


The Hereafter of Things

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agent Carter References, Avengers Tower, Break Up, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Deaf Clint Barton, Depression, Friends to Lovers, Language of Flowers, Lovers to Friends, M/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Science Triumvirate of Foster Stark and Banner, Viva Ecuador
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:51:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 72,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The left brain says: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.</p><p>The right brain says: loves in motion don't always stay in motion as they are supposed to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes--
> 
> \- Between the initial encouragement, continuous beta reading, and long-distance hand-holding, this story would not exist without quidnunc-life. Much love also to notthatstraightbishop and warpbears for listening to me when I needed it.
> 
> \- The majority of this was written before Age of Ultron came out. If the canon lines up in this story, it was by sheer happenstance 99% of the time.
> 
> \- The "right brain" line from the second half of the summary comes from "The New Physics" by Richard Jackson.

_“I’d like to write to you about all this._  
_Similarly, I’d like not to have to write_  
_about all the things we are  
_ _and could never be: the hereafter of things.”_

-John Ashbery, “Capital O”

 

 

It had happened in a way that, in retrospect, made sense to the rest of them: from the outsider’s perspective, there had been no clues along the way, no snapped branches at forks in the path to show where they had everything had started to bubble and distort under some invisible pressure. Only a few milestones could be plotted on a calendar--the day it started and the day it ended--and the rest was lost, blank, as if someone had pressed fast-forward to make them lose all that history.

There was an unwritten rule in Avengers Tower that during the week breakfast started sometime around seven am, and everyone showed up more or less on time; but that day, a Thursday, late in the month and bitter cold for March, it was already half-past seven and Natasha had still not pushed through the communal kitchen door. She was usually the first person on the scene, already tinkering with the overly-complicated coffee machine Tony had spotted in a magazine and simply had to have, and no one else knew how to work it. It was 7:30, there was no source of caffeine, and every last one of them, Clint in particular, was eyeing the machine forlornly under droopy, half-asleep lids.

Steve and Bucky had been missing too, but they had just come back from a mission in Eritrea late the night before. They could sleep in, or just stay in bed for however long they wanted, doing whatever they wanted and no one knew or had to know, especially after their apartment had been sound-proofed a few years earlier.

Natasha emerged just before eight, bags under her eyes and bedhead keeping the rest of their complaints from being vocalized, even when she took one look at the coffee machine, rolled her eyes, and fell into the empty chair beside Clint.

“Steve and Bucky broke up last night.”

* * *

 

Natasha’s favorite time of day was 1:45 in the morning--it was a liminal period where the sounds of the last remaining night-owls’ feet upon the floor finally faded and she could hear the sounds of regret of the others who knew they had to keep trudging onwards towards sunrise without getting even a moment of sleep. She had made it a habit of staying up to that hour at least once a week just for the quiet, and it had been a glorious quiet, unusually so;  when there was a timid knock on her apartment door just around 1:48, it was as if the door had been nearly knocked off its hinges.

“Clint, you really need to go to bed--oh.”

Steve opened his mouth to speak but shut it again without anything more than a heavy breath that was too defeated to call a sigh. An old creased plastic bag hung on his fingertips, lumpy and stretched with what he must have haphazardly thrown in. Even though he was looking anywhere but her, she could still spot the puffiness of his face, the reddish tinge in his eyes.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late…” he muttered, nose clearly clogged. “Can I crash on your couch tonight?” She stepped aside and he trudged in, letting the bag slip off his fingers and onto the floor as he collapsed into the couch.

Natasha had never seen Steve like this firsthand, but she had certainly heard about it, in degrees--those moments where he stopped trying to hold up the impossible standards that the title of Captain America implied, where his shoulders slumped with the pressure and he let himself be squeezed until shiny tracks wandered down his face. Sam had come to her once last year after she had gone off the grid--there had been a close call with Peggy that had shaken him, leaving cracks in the chassis from every phone call from her nursing home that came bearing nothing but bad news.

“He’s...well, he’s okay now, but man, Nat…” Sam had said after Peggy’s. “I was there for one of those phone calls. When it looked like she wasn’t going to get any better, he just wasn’t--he seemed so much smaller. Like if he had never gotten that serum in the first place, almost.”

The next day, Natasha had dug through old SSR files until she found the thick, dusty report Peggy had compiled after the ill-fated mission in the Alps: it was meticulous, detailed to the point of near-irrelevance, except for a lone throw-away paragraph towards the end that told more than it probably meant to.

_2300 hours--Commandos report Rogers missing from the base camp. Rogers found half hour later by Agent Carter in back room of what was left of nearby tavern. Rogers returned to base camp 0045 hours. Commandos assigned to rotating watch duty for the night._

The sight of Steve like this was paralyzing. “Do you need anything?” she ventured. “Water, or…?”

He didn’t answer.

“What happened, Steve?” She almost asked if anything had happened at all, but it seemed like a ridiculous question given--well, everything in front of her.

He still didn’t answer. His shoulders began to shake, and he buried his face in both of his large hands like he was hoping they would swallow him up. They certainly were trying. And while she wasn’t at all confident they would succeed, she still made her way beside him on the couch and was nearly taken aback when his frame dwarfed hers, just like Sam had said.

Comforting others still was not a strong suit of hers, but it had gotten better in recent years--she knew where to place her hand (on his shoulder), when to go get tissues (first sign of tears, no waiting for the sniffling to start). The words would never come easily and never right away, halting and stubborn across her tongue, but that had been with people she had seen upset like this before. Not Steve. Never Steve.

“Do you--do you want me to go wake up Sam? I have no problem with getting him up--”

“He’s... visiting his sister in North Carolina right now,” he mumbled. “It’s her birthday.”

“Right,” she said, mouth tightening into a small frown. The hand on the shoulder wasn’t doing a damn thing so she moved to try to take one of his hands in hers and away from his face. The one that remained shifted, still trying to bury his eyes in the great expanse of his palm. “Hey, hey…it’s...well. I can see it’s not all right. Do you want to talk about it?”

After couple sniffles and shuddering breaths, Steve was able to sit upright, head flung back toward the ceiling, eyes squeezed shut. It was an expression Natasha had seen on him many times before, bracing himself for some blow, an impact, some blotch of pain ready to tear through his body. “It’s--”

There was a knock at the door--again.

Of all the times. She squeezed his shoulder, bounded over to the door to tell whoever it was to go the fuck away, that _honestly_ , couldn’t they see it was nearly two o’clock in the morning and she had more important things to attend to--

Bucky was standing on the other side of the door, staring straight ahead, straight at her, and with that blank sort of look that Steve and Sam had warned them to look out for right after he moved into the Tower. It was one hundred percent a bad sign, of what they could never be sure until afterwards, but he was retreating into himself when that happened, according to the doctors they had been to. You had to grab his hand and pull him back from whatever path his head was dragging him down.

“Bucky?” she said slowly, stepping on the other side of the door and keeping it open a crack with her foot. “Is everything okay? Steve’s in here if you’ve been looking for him…”

Instead of answering, his eyes got wide and lost that blank sheen, growing an edge of panic until he backed up clumsily and stumbled slightly back down the hall where their apartment was. “Nevermind, nevermind--”

“Bucky--”

“Leave it. Just leave it.”

Steve had stopped crying by the time she made it back to the couch, but his face was unusually pale save for the bright red of his nose. A pile of crumpled tissues laid on the table before them. He wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t look at the door where undoubtedly he must have heard at least some of their conversation--his hands rested on his knees, palms up, and it seemed as if he were eyeing the creases there, tracing them silently. They weren’t an old man’s hands, not yet, not by any practical standards, but the way he looked at them held a heaviness that made the thin bones there creak.

She didn’t want to push him. They all knew better than to do that with each other--they had been through too much, by each other’s side and alone, to know pushing would only make the elastic bands of their team snap welts into their arms.

“We had a--a fight, I guess? I don’t know, I don’t… ” he croaked after about ten minutes. He tried to take a deep breath but the attempt reached shallow in his lungs, shallow and wobbly, and he blinked forcefully to keep himself together. “We broke up. We broke up, Nat.”

His words started catching in his throat, little aborted choking sounds as his hands opened and closed around nothing and as he stared straight ahead and unfocused at her bookshelf, and whenever he did manage to speak, it sounded like he was gagging it up over and over and the acid from it was burning him from the inside.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. This wasn’t supposed to happen.” He repeated it until all the words swam together in a jumble, and his hand eventually latched onto hers, and if even if he was squeezing it a little too hard, she didn’t care. She had dealt with worse for less.

He was able to drift off to sleep by 3:30, slumped against the arm of the couch and a thin blanket unable to choose whether to cover his torso or legs. In some part of her head, there was a voice insisting that she go find Clint, call Sam, do something to at least stave off the worst of what she knew was coming, but there was a lead lump in her stomach that was keeping her from moving. It weighed her down, and already she was feeling the poisonous bits of the metal creep through her bloodstream, the anxiety and the doubt.

* * *

 

“What do you mean, _they broke up?_ ” Tony finally said after the silence lasted a little too long past everyone’s endurance level. “Those two can’t break up--that’s like, physically impossible for them or something. What’s that gooey crap they always say? End of the line, something like that?” He shook his head and turned back to spreading the too-cold cream cheese on his bagel. “I don’t believe you.”

Bruce eyed Natasha boring holes into the back of his head and grimaced. “I don’t know why she would lie about that.” 

“Yeah,” she said dully. “Why the hell would I lie about that?” 

Other than the uncomfortable shifting in chairs, Tony’s fight with the cream cheese was all that was able to puncture the stifling discomfort. He wasn’t going to turn around any time soon. 

“Steve’s still asleep at my place. Bucky’s still in their--well. What used to be _their_ apartment.” 

After she had determined Steve was sound asleep, she broke into the one-bedroom that they had for themselves, slinking along the hallway until she found Bucky curled up in the fetal position on their made bed--it wasn’t a great sign, but it certainly wasn’t the worst that she could have found. 

A cursory look around the rest of the apartment had showed no signs of anything broken or even knocked slightly out of place. It wasn’t like them, taking the fight home even in their words. If they argued, they simply huffed about the Tower glumly for a day or so until _something_ happened, and suddenly they were being caught making out in empty conference rooms when they were supposed to be heading to a mission briefing. (That something was the subject of a team betting pool that Natasha refused to be a part of, given that it would be patently unfair since she had accidentally come across them a couple times after such occasions. The first time, Steve was holding a single flower, a great blooming purple crocus, likely, and he had smiled sheepishly with a hint of _please don’t tell the others_ around the edges. Each time the flower was different. She didn’t know why.)

What did had caught her eye--the shield was splayed on the ground, concave side up, and both of their outer mission uniforms were left crumpled at the feet of the coffee table.

“I believe we have meeting at nine this morning for a mission next week,” Thor said quietly. “Should we--”

“They’re calling in sick. I’ll get them the minutes,” she muttered. “Tread carefully. I don’t know what happened, and knowing them, they won’t be too open about it, either.”

Every other day, they squeezed around the lone table in the kitchen, elbows knocking every time someone reached for the sugar or orange juice, gossip and snark flying--but Natasha watched each of them slowly wither away from their informally designated chair and back out the door, plates and bowls balanced in the crooks of their elbows. Clint stayed behind. He wasn’t even nibbling on his toast, burned and punched with holes from his clumsy attempts at spreading the raspberry jam.

“Are you okay?” he finally said after Bruce had assembled the pages of his newspaper and left.

“It’s not me I’m worried about.” 

“You just look--” 

“Tired? Yeah, I got less than three hours of sleep.”

A grin flickered across his face and he stuck his finger in one of the holes in the toast, licking off the jam that stuck to his nail. “What’s going to happen now, Nat?”

She knew what he meant. She knew what that small lip bite meant, what he was waiting for when he scrunched his mouth up to one side (always the right, because he couldn’t get his face to move the other way). Dealing with Clint was one thing; dealing with the rest of the team as two key players dealt with an intense personal issue was another completely.

“We wait.” She held up her phone. “We text Sam to get his ass back up here because he knows those two better than any of us do. And we wait, at least until there’s some indication of what we can do.”

Clint had given up on eating the toast, instead opting to mash it into a pulp of jam and crumbs with the flat side of the nearest fork. “It’s just...if anyone had a chance, it would’ve been them.”

* * *

 

It looked easy, but it hadn’t always been that way. It hadn’t ever really been that way, if Steve was being honest with himself, which was less often than people probably suspected.

Bucky came home just over a year after the helicarriers crashed into the Potomac and the rubble of the Triskelion flew into the sky and cracked the pavement on the George Washington Parkway. Linked arm in arm with Steve and Sam as they walked into the Tower, he did not look restrained, only tired. It had been a year, and it had been a long one, traveling up and down the east coast from the deep quiet forests of Maine to the tenderly-manicured lawns in wealthy Georgia neighborhoods and back again, occasionally making a foray into middle-of-nowheres in Tennessee and Kentucky to disappear for weeks on end, but never for too long.

Once was lost, now was found--Steve wasn’t sure whether to thank something along the lines of grace or just pure happenstance, but he was home. Or: not home as they had dreamt of during the war, but what home had to be. Seventy years too late, pushed and pulled by hands that wouldn’t let them be.

“Where did you find him?” Bruce asked as they watched the medical and psych staff Tony had hired start their initial check-ups. Steve felt his eyes on him, his fidgety hands, his boot shifting on the tile floor. “Was he--”

“Found him back in DC. He had been sitting at the base of the New York pillar at the World War II Memorial.” They hadn’t even thought he would be back in Washington. All of their efforts in the preceding weeks had been concentrated around their old Brooklyn neighborhood, searching for any buildings that had escaped extensive renovations and still resembled their past selves in whatever memories could have started to inch back towards the surface. But Sam had come down with a nasty stomach bug and they had returned early--walking back to Sam’s apartment with his last prescription refill in hand, he had spotted the figure in the distance.

It had been raining, Steve always noted thankfully, at least for his sake. Bucky had been soaked to the bone, worn boots sloshing in the sandy puddles in the path around the Mall, and it was slow going back to Sam’s building.

“You want to know if I remember you,” Bucky had said without any inflection of a question, hesitantly touching Steve’s arm to stop him before they headed up the stairs.

“I’m just glad that we found you. That’s not--”

“You feel familiar. Like I’ve remembered you before.” He had been staring where his gloved left hand lay on Steve’s sleeve, lightly grasping there. “Even if not everything is coming now.”

Even as he had felt that searing hand gripping at his insides, Steve had smiled--Bucky was there, with him, and there was a light behind his eyes that was starting to flicker on, buzzing a bit as it warmed.

(When Sam had seen him, after they had made it up, his eyebrows had shot up and he had grinned as wide as the then-subsiding nausea would allow--“Man, that doesn’t look like my prescription.”)

“That’s probably a good sign,” Bruce said quietly.

“What?” He hadn’t realized how badly his mind had wandered.

“That he was there, at the memorial. And at the right state.”

“Yeah.”

They were sitting on one side of a one-way mirror in case things got out of hand--that was what Steve had been told, anyway. He didn’t know why Bruce was there--if something were to go wrong, there would not be much he could do without pouring more gasoline on the fire. More than likely someone else had sent him as an envoy. Sam still wasn’t feeling a hundred percent, after all. Natasha had been in the wind for a while now chasing her new covers, and most everyone else were on missions of their own that were on their way to wrapping up. Or maybe Bruce had simply volunteered.

Despite the opaque wall that he was facing, Bucky still squinted at it curiously every few minutes while the doctors gently took his vitals, as if he were trying to look through it. _Because he is very aware I’m probably on the other side of it_. When he was turned away from it, his face was screwed up in what could have been read as frustration, anger even, but it was an expression that he had seen so many times in the light made dull by the grime on the windows of their tiny apartment as Bucky had tried to thread a needle and repair his work pants--it was concentration.

The initial examination was quick, just to get a baseline, a point to mark on that line that they still hadn’t yet neared the end of. They left Bucky with Steve, along with a small card detailing the next time they would have to see him. 

“They’ve got therapy set up for you,” Steve said as they made their way back to his apartment. “That’s good.”

Bucky nodded, a stiff aborted nod that stuck with his chin down, eyes focused on whatever he was still intensely focused on. That something clearly was not in the room with them, and Steve couldn’t tell if he had nodded at the actual words or just in recognition that he had said anything at all. 

“Apple cake.” 

Steve stopped fiddling with his keys in the door and turned to him, finding Bucky’s face relaxed but still with those rough edges of uncertainty. Even then he wouldn’t look at him, not directly. “Your mother made apple cake for you on your birthday.”

“She did, yeah.” He tried to keep his voice as level as he could, tried to keep what was burning up his chest towards his throat from pulling too wide a grin from him--don’t do too much too soon, Bruce had warned, don’t overwhelm him. He tried, but from the flicker at the corner of Bucky’s mouth, he knew he hadn’t quite succeeded.

He could live with that.

* * *

 

_PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE WILSON._

There was no emoticon or emoji latched on to the latest in the string of unanswered texts and missed calls--it was long past the point of passive-aggressive smiley faces and that one little monkey covering its eyes. Even the message that had just been about twenty of the ambulance emojis in a row went unanswered.

It was unlike him, and she needed him to cut it the fuck out. Neither Steve nor Bucky had yet emerged from where they had hid themselves the previous night, and with the sun setting over the New York skyline, she was starting to get worried, more so than she was already. Back-up was sorely needed at this point; no one else in the Tower had proven that they could quite navigate the tricky waters that flowed between those two, and she was not about to risk it when it mattered most. Let them shrink away from the problem--it was fine by her.

Except for Sam. She needed Sam.

He had been there for all of this, since the beginning, and he was going to be there at the end of it all, too, if he would just--

Her phone had started buzzing, skittering across the counter precariously close to the edge.

“Took you long enough,” she snapped.

“Whoa whoa whoa, Natasha, I just got back to my phone. Tell me what’s--”

“You don’t _not_ check your phone for this long when you’re a fucking _Avenger_ \--”

“Nat. _Nat_. Just give me one second.” The next time he spoke his voice sounded further away, more garbled. “In the middle of the birthday party my cousin’s wife went into labor. I’ve been on hospital and babysitting duty all day--like I literally have an armful of children right now.”

“I’m on speaker.” She squeezed her eyes shut and took the two steps she needed to fall into the nearby armchair. Its leather squeaked, probably from the lack of anyone actually using the engineering library for what it was meant for.

“Sure are.”

“With your armful of children.”

“Sorry to cut out whatever colorful vocabulary you had for me,” he laughed. With any other person, that laugh would have been completely unacceptable, but it was Sam. That particular lilt, how it fell away to nothing so quickly at the end--he knew Mjolnir was about to drop right on his foot.

“Steve and Bucky broke up.” And she waited--there was nothing on his end of the call except for some vague sounds of small feet trying to find their grip to stand on Uncle Sam’s pants leg. “It’s messy and--just--I can’t do this by myself. Is that what you wanted to hear? I need your help.”

“Geez,” he sighed.

“You don’t sound that surprised,” she said. “You know something we don’t?”

“Let me get back up there, okay? I’ll see you by breakfast at the latest.”

She looked at the clock--someone was bound to be tiptoeing around the kitchen cooking dinner by now, or at least mixing up some new after-workout protein shake Tony had discovered, and she sighed directly into the receiver. Somehow the grey static of noise that fed back into her ear pushed back whatever she had been about to say. A thanks, perhaps--or not, but probably.

More than anything at that moment, she was glad that he couldn’t see her face, though she could still hear what he would be saying. “Man, I haven’t seen someone looked that conflicted over something since Thor discovered he loved skinny jeans but couldn’t sit down in them.” The Black Widow, showing each new wave of thought across her face like a neon beacon. Who would’ve ever guessed, right?

“Make it an _early_ breakfast.”

“Sunrise pancakes, you got it.”

It was as if he didn’t understand the gravity of the circumstances they all found themselves--or, Natasha thought as she hopped down the stairs to the floor below, he was putting up a front. That was something that she knew all too well.

Her phone buzzed twice quickly in her back pocket as she pushed through the door into the kitchen, which was just as empty as it had been bustling earlier that morning when ground zero decided to spread from their corner of the Tower. The microwave door was ajar, light still on, and the paper towel that had been used to avoid splatter was hanging precariously on the edge of the nearby trashcan. Remnants of Rhodey’s famous taco soup, by the looks of the rust-colored splotches. Bucky’s favorite. Rhodey had started making two batches of the stuff, putting one in the communal fridge and another in a secret fridge under Tony’s bar on the top floor, and that hidden tub was the only reason anyone other than Bucky got a bowl.

So Bucky had been there. That was easy enough--but it was a hasty exit, just based on the mess alone.

A second buzz from the phone--three texts from Sam.

 _Would you say no to pressurized pancakes?_  
_*presunrise, jfc_  
_I mean, I’ll pressurize the hell out of your flapjacks if you’re into that sort of thing while helping you DEPRESSURIZE the situation._

 _I’ll eat whatever as soon as you get here_ , she typed back.

“Could you pass me that spoon next to you?” Bucky’s left hand was curled along the bottom of a still-steaming bowl of what was definitely Rhodey’s soup while his right was listlessly motioning to her right.

Maybe he had been sleeping--his hair was matted on one side, overflowing in cowlicks on the other, and his blinks were slow with a small downward twitch of his mouth every time his eyelids came back up. It was just as likely that he had been doing anything _but_ sleeping.

Since when did reading a situation become more of a guessing game than second nature? Did they chop trees down across the path when they told each other it was over? Did they burn the dictionaries of all the languages in which they said _I love you_? She was tripping over their fallen logs, tongue-tied in their ashes. The smoke and dust hung in the air and seeped into all of their lungs.

Still--she handed him the spoon, staring intently, and he wouldn’t look at her. “Bucky.”

“I just want to eat my soup.”

“Do you want company?”

“I don’t want--I don’t want to talk about... _it_.”

“Well,” she shrugged. “We don’t have to then.”

Ten minutes later they had made their way to a balcony Tony somehow still thought was a secret but that Clint had discovered within three hours of moving in--the staircase was hidden by a thin door in a dark corner and led to a small overcrop of concrete and minimal railing beside the giant A logo. With his legs hanging over the edge, Bucky poked at the soup with his fork, occasionally eyeing the chunk of naan Natasha had swiped from Bruce’s shelf in the pantry.

“How was the meeting this morning?” he asked haltingly after a couple of minutes. “I got the minutes,” he added, “but--how was the...you know.” Usually the faces he was making--the frowns, the nose twitches of searching for the right turn of phrase--would be directed somewhere other than his food. Steve once told her that he used to only look away for a moment instead of engaging in all the facial acrobatics at moments like this, but this new tic was (in his words) cute.

“How was the what?" 

“You know...the feel of it all. Is anyone worried about this?”

She sighed, took a moment to watch more lights flick on in the skyline. “Some of Jane’s instruments picked up a Chitauri transmission talking about Earth. Old hat, right?”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Have you seen the footage from the last time? There was a hole where we are right now. And also in a lot of other places."

And finally--a laugh. Or not necessarily a laugh, but at least something that could qualify as a chuckle, and he managed to take a bite of his meal. The bowl was no longer steaming, and it didn’t appear to be all that satisfying lukewarm, so he put it down between them. “I don’t think New York’s changed all that much,” he said quietly. “Not really. But I could be wrong about that since, well...a lot of times I can be.” His mouth became a single severe line and his eyes fell out of focus watching the headlights of the cars inch along the avenue below. “Not everything in the future--or, well, _now_ had to be different. Right?”

He did look at her now, and in the shadowy light of dusk she noticed the bags pulling the skin under his eyes, the darker flushed splotches across his cheeks.

“It doesn’t have to be, but it usually is...from my experience,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a good thing.”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

When he left to go back into the Tower, he left the soup behind. The thick stew had coagulated in the night air, ice cold.

* * *

 

Bucky remembered like the past was a many-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and he was merely as determined and stubborn as he always was: four small, misshapen pieces would tumble from the box, and a few beats of his fists later, they would fit together whether they were meant to or not. None of his therapists knew the proper picture he was aiming for, especially not for the flashes of things from before the war, so they didn’t know. They couldn’t possibly know. And Bucky would walk back with Steve to the apartment and he would say he remembered something, and Steve would brace for it.

Sometimes the stories Bucky was able to put together from the fragments were so improbable to be hilarious. The middle of the third week,  he had insisted Morita knew them back in Brooklyn, that he’d lived in their building, and every time Steve had gotten himself in a fight, he would whistle Camptown Races loudly down the alley until Bucky would show up to really teach the goon a lesson--and one time, Bucky had shown up hauling one of those old metal trashcans and had thrown the whole thing at the punk, knocking him into the wall and out cold so they could run.

“That’s not...that’s not what happened,” Steve said, trying not to laugh even though Bucky was hinting at a grin himself thinking about it.

Yes, Bucky saved Steve’s ass from back alley fist fights. Yes, Morita was a really loud whistler, and it had been great on the front. But Camptown Races was always the go-to song of the kids in the apartment down the hall from Bucky growing up, and it was Steve who had been knocked into the trash cans.

“Right,” Bucky would say. And that particular time he added, “Why wouldn’t I have just put the trashcan down and punched him? That really didn’t make sense.”

But sometimes--more often than not--what came back to him wasn’t anything that fanned the glowing warmth at the center of his ribcage, and Steve didn’t know how to help. There weren’t any words he could say to untangle the knots that had formed as these memories weaved in convoluted loops back to the surface--these memories weren’t shared. Steve could imagine them well enough from the files they had recovered: stories from the Burmese jungles and the humid stink of the remains of his orders sinking into the weave of his shirt, following him into a cold vault crackling with drills and screws and the leftovers of current ready to bury itself in him. The legacy of a small, stout man in glasses and a bowtie was always there as Steve made his way through the stack of reports--there on the bank of the Han River as the Korean War brought the bridge tumbling down, there when the tanks first rolled across the Kuwaiti border, there when bullets found their way into their targets. There wasn’t any space for a cohesive narrative, just pieces Bucky couldn’t have wanted to relive, and Steve couldn’t tell him that it wasn’t what happened. So he kept the thoughts to himself.

Those days, Bucky would shuffle beside him into their living room, quiet as Steve had never seen him in Brooklyn, and curl up with a space documentary on Netflix.

Those nights, Steve learned to set an alarm for two-thirty so he could put his ear halfway against the wall to hear when Bucky would start screaming in his sleep by three.

It was six months into this routine--not that they would ever admit that it was a routine--and Steve had learned more than when to set the alarm. If Bucky was bent around his pillow, it was okay to put a hand on his shoulder; if he was rigid at a board at the center of the bed, the same action would earn Steve a bloody nose. So many small movements in the face, twitches in the fingers--and there was something that worked best for each of them. Trial and error.

He would stay until Bucky woke up, and he would wipe the sweat from Bucky’s brow until their breathing slowed--because Bucky’s heart was always mid marathon when his eyes would shoot open wide against the blank of the room’s high ceilings, and Steve couldn’t get his pulse straight seeing him like this. It always struck him as a sort of role reversal, with Bucky pulled into himself in damp sheets while Steve knelt on the floor by his side. And he could use those old tricks Bucky had used when he had been close to his deathbed with pneumonia before the war--wrap his hands around the edge of Bucky’s face, squeeze his hand, anything to try ground him to the things he could see that wouldn’t hurt him, but until he choked out Steve’s name, he couldn’t relax, get anything more than the shallowest of breaths.

Ultimately, the doctors had said after the first few weeks, he could get better. He could function. The risk was--and that was the thing--that the PTSD could swallow him, and there was so little they could do to anticipate which way he would tilt. At the moment, there wasn’t enough to make a prediction; even with the nightmares, they found that whatever was wrenching Bucky awake so violently was staying buried in his subconscious, that only the fear stayed with him for the worst dregs of his memories. He may not remember everything--good or bad--but he could easily remember enough to at least get a grasp on who he once was.

In the moments immediately following Bucky’s recognition of him, though, he had hope. Bucky’s mouth would pull down in a grimace overflowing with relief before splitting into a light smile that brought the smoke of the Hydra base right back to Steve’s nose like he was rescuing him from the experiment table all over again.

“Steve.”

“You’re okay, Buck, you’re okay.”

There was the one night, unseasonably cold, where even beneath layer on layer of blankets he could see Bucky shivering, adding an extra deep shudder with every shout muffled in his pillow. So he took his designated vigil, kneeled beside him, grabbing his right hand when he saw that Bucky wasn’t poised to lash out in his sleep. He jerked awake, and in the dull light streaming in through the windows from the surrounding buildings, shiny tracks shone on his face as his chest heaved in and out, skin straining against muscle and ribs.

“ _Steve_. Steve, Steve, Steve--”

“Hey, hey...I’m here, I’m right here.”

Bucky’s left hand latched in a vice-like grip on Steve’s shirt and tugged him closer, his chest hitting the side of the bed. “Please stay. Please. I--” Eyelids fluttering, his gaze rolled up to the ceiling and then back to Steve. “I need you to stay with me.”

“Okay,” he breathed. “I can do that. Do you want some water?” Bucky nodded, face crumpling and uncrumpling with each move of his head. “I’ll be right back, I promise. Right back.”

The light buzzed when he flicked it on and the buzzing only seemed to grow louder as it screamed against his pupils. Two glasses of water--plastic cups--that was easy enough. It was easy enough. Steve filled them both from the filter jug Bruce had bought him for his last birthday and set them on the counter, staring from his spot leaning against the kitchen island, arms crossed. The normal burn of panic had not yet subsided, wisping up his chest and into his throat, spreading across the span of his shoulders--and it took a couple moments to realize that his fingernails were digging into his forearm, leaving little dark pink half moons.

When he got back to Bucky’s room, he was sitting up, sheets pooling around his hips with deep shadows from the dim bedside lamp, and he could feel that the marks had already faded.

“Thanks,” he muttered, throwing back the entire glass in three gulps. And Steve waited. It was never clear if he wanted to talk about any of this--until he actually started talking. “You know…” Bucky wasn’t looking at him, mouth pursed into a tight frown, and he started nodding in a way that Steve thought felt bitter--if there was a bitter way to nod, that was it. “The people who... Hydra... they told me when Christmas and New Years were, right after the war. I don’t know if the dates were right, but it’s what they said and I didn’t have much of a calendar. I think--I think I was still giving them a hard time. The first thing they told me the second 1946 hit was what had happened to you.”

The empty cup rolled in his left hand, clacking against every groove in his fingers and palm.

“I don’t remember much after that.”

An hour passed, and Bucky had dozed off against Steve’s shoulder, eventually slipping down to press his face into his hip in a dead sleep without even the usual foot twitch that he used to watch from across their room before the war.

The clock ticked closer to the acceptable hours of the morning, and when the sun edged around the buildings outside their window, Steve still hadn’t slept. Natasha had talked about doing this every so often, staying up to be alone with her thoughts, but he couldn’t even do that. The panicked burn had chilled to a bright sort of pain that wrapped around the bones in his arms, coming in waves, and if it subsided for quick moments when he rested his hand against Bucky’s head, so be it.

They were there, together, young in the twenty-first century with an open window that was pointed in the general direction of the Hudson. It was the impossible--of course there would be side effects, he told himself. Roadblocks, not insurmountable.

* * *

 

Sam showed up at eight minutes past five in the morning, toting a to-go bag from IHOP that was a size Natasha didn’t even know they made.

“I keep my promises,” he said with a grin when he found her in the common living room.

“How fast did you have to drive to get here?”

“That’s really not the important thing,” he laughed, but it stopped short. “I got one order of strawberry and one chocolate chip. Your pick. You’ve had a long couple days.”

She couldn’t decide--they ended up splitting the orders between them, and while Sam ate patiently, waiting for her to spill about the events of the last couple of days, she found herself swirling together the melted chocolate and strawberry syrup with a tine of her plastic fork.

“So your cousin’s wife...safe delivery?” she said after about fifteen minutes.

“Yup, a little baby girl. Tried to get them to name her Natasha, but they had already picked something out,” he grinned.

“Sure you did.”

“Would’ve been a lucky baby.”

The corner of her mouth turned upwards despite herself, but only slightly, and only for a moment. “Seriously, though,” she said, straightening her back. “You were in Greensboro, right? I’ve never heard of anyone making that trip in this amount of time.”

And he laughed again, threw on a jokingly smug smile, and relaxed back into his seat on the couch. Shook his head, and the smile faded. She knew he wasn’t going to sate her curiosity, but that wasn’t the point.

“I was already planning on heading back up here, y’know,” he said. “Turns out...well, they got close while we were deployed, and they had heard it was Rachel’s birthday and they were in the area, so…” He slowly pushed his fork into the last remain pancake in his styrofoam box. “They were coming by! And I wasn’t prepared to see them.”

“Who’s they?”

“Riley’s family.”

Sam’s face was completely blank, more so than Natasha had ever really seen, and her arm twitched slightly as she deliberated on whether or not this was the right time to offer a steady hand on his shoulder, whether he wanted to show that he was upset, whether he wanted her to know. Either way, the only person in the Avengers who knew any bit of Sam’s personal life before SHIELD fell, aside from the most basic of details, was Steve. And Steve wasn’t there.

“So I really only got here a few hours ahead of schedule,” he said with a cough. “Gave me a better reason to head out than ‘something came up.’”

“Something _did_ come up.”

“Details, though. Details are important. I’ve never been able to lie to my family that easily.”

The subject felt forcibly dropped, and they sat in silence for another stretch of time, the only noise coming from Sam as he scooted closer to what was left of her food, eyeing her questioningly before swiping another bite. Eventually she plopped it in his lap and rolled her eyes.

“You still haven’t told me what went down,” he said and moved the emptied to-go box back to its corner of the table.

“They broke up, Sam.”

“Did either of them say why?”

Sam was concerned--that much was obvious, but it was so easy to tell. She could go down the list of his typical cues and cross every single one of them off the list without even having to dig, and no one was ever that easy to read, not in their usual company. He was trying too hard. Again.

“What’s going on with you?” She grabbed his shoulder just hard enough to make him look at her. “You never answered my question earlier. Do you know something we don’t?”

“No, actually,” he sighed, wrenching his gaze away from Natasha to squint around the room before getting up and rifling through a few cabinets. “You know how they are--were...about their relationship. Clint told you about how we found out they were together in the first place? It wasn’t exactly on purpose on their part.”

“Oh yes,” she said with a small grin. She and Clint had been in public, at the grocery store no less, restocking her fridge after a long mission away, when he just simply had to recreate _exactly_ how everyone heard. It had been so obscene that they were forced to abandon their cart in the middle of the frozen food aisle and leave the store immediately. “I figured they wouldn’t be entirely forthcoming about it, but maybe--”

“Maybe one of them had said something to me,” he finished. “Nah, not this time.” He stood up from where he had been kneeling, an unopened bottle of Tony’s favorite vodka firmly in hand.

“But what’s going to happen now?”

“You and I are going to have some sunrise screwdrivers to wash down our pre-sunrise pancakes.” Already he had reached inside the IHOP bag and pulled out a jug of orange juice, peeling the 7-11 receipt from the condensation along the side.

“You know what I mean,” she sighed, even as she went back to the cabinet that had produced the vodka and reached back to grab the glasses Tony kept back there too. “They’re not going to talk about it with anyone, and we’re still going to have to act like a team with two people who won’t be able to be around each other in a fully-functional capacity. Maria emailed you the minutes from our meeting yesterday, right? How are we supposed to deal with that threat when they...when they’re basically in crisis mode?”

“I know, Nat,” Sam said quietly as he mixed the drinks. “I know.”

“They’ve been there for each other as much as they could be since the beginning. How could this--I just...”

“I know.” The glass he held before her was filled with a pastel orange and smelled like bathroom cleaner but she took it anyway. “They’ll be okay, Natasha. Hell, they’ve been through worse than this before.”

Fully aware that she couldn’t hold her tongue, she took a swig from the screwdriver instead, and it tasted exactly how she imagined orange-scented bathroom cleaner might have tasted. There was something to be said for Sam’s remark, but there was something else to be said about the rupture itself, that even when they thought they had lost each other in the past, the memory wasn’t tainted by the bitterness, the rejection. They had said _forever_ from the beginning only to reconsider-- _maybe not_. This wasn’t as bad as dying, as torture, but there were different ways that the world could end.

“Your phone’s buzzing,” Sam said, handing it to her.

The time read 5:45 above a text from Thor-- _Steve requested me as a sparring partner this morning. Considering things, I thought it appropriate for you to know. We are meeting in the gymnasium at 6:15._ Immediately following were the eyes and broken heart emojis.

“He’s very good with those,” Sam noted from over Natasha’s shoulder.

“I take it you two don’t text much--it didn’t take him long.” She stood, throwing back the rest of the drink. “He even signs off most messages with the little alien head. Thinks it’s funny...which it is.”

“You going down there to watch? Need company?”

Natasha looked him up and down from over her shoulder. Despite the grin, there were still bits of fatigue pulling at him and his blinking was starting to get heavy. “Get some rest, okay?” He nodded reluctantly, and she chalked up one more person to be worried about.

She quickly made her way to one of Clint’s many secret hideouts around the gym--one of the only ones he had actually let slip on how to actually get to--and waited. Turned her phone off vibrate and onto silence for good measure, especially since the latest turn of events had made her more popular than usual. It was only a few minutes past six, and Thor was already stretching; even from her distance up by the rafters, she could see his muscles moving under what Tony had called “glorified yoga pants.”

 _Look up_ , she texted him, and once he saw the message and caught her gaze, she held up a single finger to her lips.

He nodded once, a solemn gesture of understanding, and and she made a mental note to try to talk with him one-on-one--splitting time between worlds and between New York City and New Mexico, he didn’t seem to have too much free time aside from training and breakfast. There was something there, she suspected, between the story of their lives, that would make for fast friends, if they could only find the right moment to pick it out.

But for now, she nodded back, a thanks for alerting her to Steve’s first movement from her apartment since he had arrived there the middle of the previous night.

Steve showed up at 6:15 on the dot without his usual workout bag and already wrapping tape around his hands. His frame slumped, but it was barely noticeable amid his usual symptoms of early-morning fatigue--and he wasn’t looking at Thor, even though she could see his mouth moving.

“You are going to have to speak more loudly this morning, Steve,” Thor said, his voice bouncing around the empty gym. “My video call with Jane went awry when she was demonstrating a new discovery to me--the resulting noise has temporarily hurt my hearing.” It was a complete lie, of course. Anyone who had left their own apartment last night--which certainly had not been Steve--had heard Thor thunderously snoring away by eight pm.

Steve finished taping his hands, and Thor was able to sneak a wink toward the ceiling. He knew why she was there, and she grinned back. (Tony’s gripe about how gods couldn’t be spies seemed a little less nonsensical.)

“That’s rough going,” Steve yelled, and he sounded tired, a plodding effort in every extra strain he put in his voice in that unnecessary effort so Thor could hear him.

“It will improve soon enough,” Thor said. It would have been almost comical, this shouting conversation, had it been under any other circumstances. She could see Clint yelling over everyone, “ _It’s fine, my hearing aids are on, guys,_ ” while making a face at her and then another face at Bucky, who was always the only other one at the meeting who would pick his remark out of the din and could never keep a straight face.

But again: any other circumstances.

“How is Jane, though?”

“She’s doing well. Busy, but well.” Thor’s smile flashed and faded--the pause that followed was waiting for him to reciprocate the question, holding its hands out patiently as if it hadn’t yet realized the painfully obvious, the squirming discomfort in every avoidance of eye contact and subject.

“That’s good,” Steve said finally. “So, uh…”

“Best two out of three, then?”

“Yeah.”

There was something off from the beginning, the very beginning, as Steve hardly ever asked others to spar with him--but even his stance was off. The way he held his hands up, the curve of his fingers: it was as if he wrapped his hands too tightly to really be functional. And still, the slump of the shoulders, not geared for a fight.

Immediately, Steve was put on the defensive. Thor stepped forward with every carefully aimed strike of his hands and feet, and while Steve was blocking every single one--almost casually--it wasn’t long before his heels were hanging off the mat and slipping onto the hardwood floor.

“So I have won the first match, I suppose?” Thor put a hand on Steve’s shoulder to help balance him before he fell backwards, as his wavering frame seemed to threaten.

“You’re not going easy on me, are you?”

“Of course not.”

Natasha could see Steve’s head down, staring at his feet while his arms swung to keep the blood flowing, to do the stretching that he should have done already, to have a reason to momentarily pull into himself, even, and she caught Thor frowning up at her, grimacing as he tilted his head toward Steve.

They started at it again, and once more she watched Thor steadily advance on Steve, pushing him to the edge of the mat with heavier blows that left his muscles straining to such a degree that even she could notice, despite the distance. And still Steve blocked them all, the sound of fist meeting forearm smacking so loudly that it was as if they were sparring right next to her, and then, almost in the time it had taken her to blink, Steve had maneuvered, flipped somehow, so that the two of them were now moving perpendicular to their previous path, but even that bit of control couldn’t get him on the offensive.

And then he was on his back, fingers dabbing at his nose and wincing. Thor froze, looked momentarily horrified before clamping his mouth shut and reaching a hand down to help him up. “I am terribly sorry, Steve, I didn’t mean to--” 

“It’s fine,” Steve huffed as he caught his breath, fingers were still at his nose, palm covering his mouth. When he pulled them away, the little dots of scarlet were clear.

“Would you like me to go retrieve some--” 

“It’s fine.” He turned away, started unwrapping his hands. A bubble of red hung near the edge of his nostril, unsure whether to trickle down to his lips.

Thor’s hand moved like he was about to say something more but Steve was already walking out the door. It slammed behind him.

* * *

 

After that one night, Steve stopped trudging back to his room once Bucky would fall back asleep from his nightmares, and it wasn’t long before he didn’t even do that much. Bucky would turn in early, and Steve would crawl under the sheets a few hours later, and neither of them acknowledged it out loud. The nightmares still came, still tore into him and forced out terrible groans and whimpers even before the three am jolt awake, but Steve assumed that his presence helped somehow--assumed it helped fight the helpless wave choking his friend when he would open one eye and find Bucky’s left arm latched onto the front of his shirt in a death grip. If he wasn’t there, what was Bucky supposed to hold on to?

He would lightly drag his fingers over the metal of that hand, and it was never as cool to the touch as he expected--whether that expectation came from its being metal or all the winters before the war when Bucky’s fingers never seemed to get rid of that numb chill he wasn’t entirely sure, but it still caught him by surprise.

Squinting in the dark, he liked to think that he could see the grooves in Bucky’s fingers shifting, like he was aware that there was someone waiting for him on the other side of the fire.

It was a rare night when Bucky couldn’t fall asleep again after three am, and it always ended with him and Steve laying on their sides, facing each other, that vice grip still pushing permanent creases into the cloth there.

“What’s going on, Buck?”

“Too much,” he breathed. “Can’t sort it out.”

Some nights he would scoot forward and press his nose into the hollow of Steve’s throat--other nights he would stare blankly at that same space or at the dull gleam of streetlights reflecting off his arm. Steve could never fall asleep after that.

He would be waiting for the other boot to drop. He was so used to all the lines that had prompted Bucky to leave his work suspenders off his shoulders, loose at the sides of his legs, shirt unbuttoned, and a foggy glass of water cradled in his hands as he posed--so dramatically, as always--to deliver a diatribe about what fucking Thaddeus had done that day. Shuffle in, drop his lunch pail, pull out of his boots by stepping on the heels, and frown at the kitchen sink, and Steve would never so much say that Bucky was waiting for someone to ask him, but there was that hollow whistle of pressure building in his chest, just by the way he held it as he breathed, and he wouldn’t release it by himself.

“Rough day?” Steve would say, or a form of it, and then it would start.

“Thaddeus has done it again.” Eye roll. Theatrical plop into the chair across from Steve, the wood groaning under the weight. “Ten times today, Steve. Ten. I counted. Left little pencil notches on the napkin from my lunch and everything. He’d ask one of us to go fetch some of the pipes and the wrenches and shit, and by god it would be at his feet ten minutes later and still, he’d ask the next unfortunate soul where his ‘goddamn pipes’ were. Answers were right in front of you, fathead. Do you need us lackeys to hold your fuckin’ hand?”

Or something of that sort--it was how it usually had gone.

Past tense, of course.

The boot never dropped, and Bucky never told him what was wrong--either he didn’t want to share or couldn’t bring himself to, and no matter which option Steve considered, he could sense the grip of Bucky’s fingers digging into his chest, into his lungs, and that old familiar feeling of the struggle to breathe crept back up his throat.

The sun still gleamed in the morning, and that particular Thursday morning, it felt cold through the little window in the bathroom where he was brushing his teeth and watching Bucky from the mirror, twisted angularly in the comforter. Neither of them had slept since two, ahead of schedule.

“Do you want breakfast?” The toothbrush was half-sticking out of his mouth when he turned around and managed to catch Bucky’s eye. He wanted to crawl back into bed. His eyes stung with fatigue like he had been crying, like the salt was still clinging to the insides of his eyelids. But he pushed through it. Forced one side of his mouth to turn upwards, felt a blob of frothy toothpaste squeeze out between his lips. “Rhodey dropped off some groceries yesterday afternoon when you were in therapy. You--you wouldn’t have to move, if you want. We could do breakfast in bed. Or--”

“You’re babbling,” he murmured, stretching his right arm straight into the air before letting it flop back down onto his chest.

“You know me, I talk too much when I haven’t slept."

“Uh--right.” His face burrowed further into the pillow. “Yeah, yeah, of course you do.”

In the water-splotched mirror, Steve saw Bucky had curled back around to the empty spot he had left in the bed, indented pillow, wrinkled sheets, and all. He wasn’t looking. Steve knew he could afford a grimace and quick punch to his thigh--not loud, middle knuckle jabbing into the thinner layer of muscle above the knee. _Sensitive move, there, Rogers_.

“Listen,” he sighed. “Let me go make you something. It’ll be nice. It’s all organic stuff. Fancy, I’m told.” _Please look at me, I’m sorry_.

“You’re worried because Morita is visiting today.” His voice was muffled by the pillow, but the flattened down couldn’t hide the lack of questioning inflection in his voice. ( _You’re worried, he had said, you’re worried. You’re worried and I still know that about you, how to connect the dots before you realized the dots had a shape at all._ ) “You could’ve been just tired, I guess,” he said, and he lifted his head from the pillow, squinting, and there was a small grin too, and the tightness uncoiled in his chest. “But more signs pointed to worried.”

So he cooked--or: he tried to cook. There were too many bags of oddly-shaped produce and leafy stalks that could have been lettuce but certainly didn’t smell like it, and none of it was suitable for breakfast. Maybe other people in the Tower enjoyed their mornings with guavamelonberries on some well-intentioned rare breed of bread, but there wasn’t time. There wasn’t the time that morning to motivate himself to even text Rhodey to ask what half this stuff was.

Thankfully there was one lone package of sausage, and Bucky loved sausage.

(That had been a thing, Steve reminded himself. Saving up for the good Italian stuff from down the street, that once-a-month dinner Bucky always managed to schedule for the fifteenth, spicy links dangling off his fork while he wished Steve a happy ides of October, of July, and in March their sharpest knife would stick itself right into the center of the fattest one.)

Like everything Rhodey had bought, it was fancy and smelled fancy--there were unfamiliar aromas barely edging out the usual smells that had graced their apartment, but Steve didn’t bother to see what was making the pops and crackles push towards foreign. The sounds grew loud in his ear and when he turned around with a full plate and the paper towel lining already stained with oil, Bucky was already sitting at the table.

“Sausage?” he said, voice still groggy.

“Yeah.” He handed him a fork with a piece already stuck on the end.

One bite, and Bucky carefully placed the fork back on the edge of the plate. His nose wrinkled--just enough to register, but not enough to warrant comment. “What time is Morita coming by?”

“Um…” There had to be juice in the fridge. Maybe even cereal. Anything for him to eat. “He said his grandson was dropping him off around one-ish?”

“Okay.” A pause. “What are you looking for?”

“Other options, instead of the…” he motioned vaguely to the untouched food, the one link with the one, single regretted bite.

“Oh.” Bucky’s mouth pulled up to one side and Steve watched as he looked between the plate and then back at him--that intensity was back, and the sausage and the expression on Steve’s face the two puzzle pieces that had to fit together, and Steve saw as he turned each clue or fragment of a recollection at ninety degree angles, waiting to see how they would fit. But he only sighed and said, “I’m not actually that hungry after all. It’s okay,” and plodded back to his--their--room.

Alone, Steve stared at the plate and felt his stomach churn. The odor was too pungent, the grease in the pan already stiffening without the stove lit underneath. He left the pan in the sink and halfheartedly shoved the plate in the fridge with a pathetic strip of tinfoil on top--he could deal with it later. Eat it later. Whichever came first.

When JARVIS announced that Morita had arrived in the lobby, Steve had barely registered that he had sat down at the kitchen table, much less that any time had passed. Yesterday’s New York Times was clutched in his hands but he hadn’t moved past the front page. An inset told him to flip to the sports section for coverage on the Yankees’ game against the Dodgers that had taken place the previous evening in California.

“Did you hear JARVIS?” Bucky’s voice said behind him, and he jumped.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Not long. Do you want to head down?”

It shouldn’t have taken Steve by surprise--he had been in touch with Morita since the Battle of New York, had heard about the course his life had taken while the ice in the Arctic only grew thicker, and god, he had even Skyped with him a few times after he had had the operation; but seeing him in person for the first time since the war was not the tap on the shoulder that he had anticipated. It was a full-on punch to the face.

“This is the weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened to me, and a lot has happened to me,” Morita half-laughed when he saw them, spinning his wheelchair around. “The army never told me being a CO came with eternal youth privileges, Jesus.”

And Bucky didn’t quite laugh with him, no--blew some air out of his nose, corner of his mouth twitched, little things, but it pulled Morita’s small smirk until it was stretched across his face.

“I just can’t believe it.” He shook his head. “How are you, though, Barnes?”

“I...uh. I might ask the same of you,” he said quietly. Steve noticed how he was pointedly not looking anywhere lower than Morita’s chest, how the gloved fingers of his left hand flexed uncomfortably. “Steve didn’t mention--”

“Oh--yeah, right. My legs. Diabetes,” he shrugged, tapping his hands on his knees with a hollow plastic sound where the prosthetics started. “Took both of them.” Casually he ran his fingers through his thinning white hair, adjusting glasses that looked out-of-place in front of his eyes. “Time makes a mess of everyone eventually. I mean, we all know that better than anyone, y’know?”

They did. And maybe Morita sensed that the moment was swelling with the disquiet of what he was thinking but couldn’t bring himself to say--so he coughed, not hard enough to cause alarm, and pointed to the elevator. “So. Lunch?”

\---

He said he had an extra therapy appointment this week that he had forgotten about, and maybe he wasn’t wrong. Therapy could mean sitting down on that nice leather couch, absently pulling at the tassels on the pillows tucked in the corners--or it could mean knowing when he needed to step away to take care of himself. Of course he knew Morita. Morita and the Commandos trickled back into his head soon after this whole ordeal got underway, first as smoke and then as shadows, slowly solidifying into flashes of faces and blips of events that were still, frankly, somewhat of a jumble. There was something about Dernier planting a bomb on the underside of a car, the tugs of some hope that Steve wouldn’t get any bright ideas. And there was something about the abominable snowman, or maybe it had been a yeti, but Steve said he hadn’t been there for that, so there was a chance that it was another case of crossed wires.

He had left Steve and Morita sitting around the kitchen table, wandered into the hall to the door--even opened and shut it to make them think he had left. And there he sat. And listened--even though he knew he shouldn’t. There wasn’t any other way to know what was going through Steve’s head, what he was feeling. Whenever he would open his mouth to ask, head still throbbing with the latest searing nightmare, something choked him, but he didn’t feel the fingers were grabbing from the outside. Something was always reaching up from his stomach and twisting his throat from the inside, and vocalizing the burning along his ribs left him spluttering--or merely feeling like it. There was too much to say and no words invented that he felt could do it justice.

“He remembers me, right?” Morita’s voice drifted dully down the hall.

“Yeah, of course,” Steve said. “All the old guys.”

“Peggy too?”

“Peggy too.”

(They had gone to see her a few weeks back--the therapists had said it would be good for him, but they hadn’t anticipated it being a Bad Day for her, or her Bad Days increasing in frequency and length, and the old woman with steel-grey hair and weathered skin didn’t seem to be anyone he knew. The voice was the same, but the mismatch pulsed behind his eyes. “Bucky,” she had sighed, heavy with a joyful relief. “They found you. And you _lived_.” She saw him, but something was pointed the wrong way, to an impossible what-could-have-been. He envied her ability to see it for what it definitely wasn’t.)

“But is he doing okay? I mean, all things--shit, it still makes me sick thinking about it.”

“Overall...yes.” He couldn’t hear Steve sigh, but he did hear the chair slide across the floor a bit, which he had noticed would happen when Steve would sigh, usually out of thought. “There are good days.”

“And not-so-good days.”

“Yeah.”

“And are _you_ doing okay?”

He waited for any bit of sound to reach him, but for the longest time, there was nothing, not the groaning of the wood or the shift of the tablecloth under their elbows. For a moment, his chest went cold at the thought of another “episode” as the doctors called it: hearing going fuzzy and faded until the furthest out he could reach was the barrier of his own skin.

But then Morita spoke again--“Well, y’know, I heard Gabe’s grandkid was with SHIELD--what, they never told you? I mean, I know I was only with ‘em for a few years, but I still got my contacts. Think he went underground after it all went sour. Should still be out there.” He paused, and there was that chair slide again, another sigh. “You’re still fighting the good fight, but you’re not alone. Yeah, the Avengers are nice, but what’s left of the 107th’s still got your back. And his too. Package deal, we got that from day one.”

_Package deal._

A third bit from the war had edged its way back, too, but he still hadn’t told Steve about it because he knew if it was real at all, it would’ve belonged only to him in the first place. Hungary, right when the thaw was on its last steps out, and they were sharing a tent in the foliage cover around Lake Velence--Steve had fallen asleep in seconds, one arm vaguely flopped over Bucky’s chest as he curled onto his side. Bucky couldn’t sleep, had a hard time of it since his time at the Hydra base, but he watched Steve’s face in the dark and how the shadows moved around it as sunrise creeped through the canvas of their tent. He thought back to Brooklyn, to the trees overhead and the nearby roads that led to Budapest and the whole series of events that never should have brought Steve there. They lived it every day, but he still needed to remind himself that they were At War, On the Front, and in a way he couldn’t believe it because Steve was there. He still could believe it, though, because of the Steve who _was_ there, laying beside him. That was the only way it could’ve made sense.

This new present, the future, it felt the same. It was real because Steve was still healthy, it was real because Morita was old and sick, it was real because he had lost his arm. But most mornings, the year on the calendar still startled him--waking up to Steve beside him made the bed feel more like a thin cot on branches and dirt, made the skyscrapers in the window shift to old church spires. Too many years remained in the dark for the war to feel anything but just over his shoulder.

That memory, he kept coming back to it again and again and again. And it was so simple. Too simple. A moment when nothing really happened that should have made it stick like it did to the inside of his skull--and yet. And yet. He remembered what he thought about but not what he felt, except there was a hint of something along the fuzzed boundaries to the void that said he had kicked out of his blanket from the warmth, a warmth that in the early, early spring of Europe should not have existed.

* * *

 

A week passed, and it was terrible.

They gathered for breakfast, avoiding the gaping hole at the table and its twin in the makeshift seat on the counter. They trained, gathered intel from the previous week’s meeting. And they didn’t see Steve or Bucky at all.

Or--Natasha saw Steve, but only because he was still sleeping on her couch, even despite her best efforts to get him to switch with her. From what she could gather and what gaps JARVIS could fill in her speculation, he didn’t leave much, and if he did, it was at odd, specific times--uncomfortably early in the morning, middle of the night, that one hour when everyone was squished on Tony’s couch to watch Top Chef. JARVIS wouldn’t say where he went, either, even though he knew. Most of the time when she would pass through her living room, he would be asleep, or faking it, and if he was truly among the conscious, getting even a one-word answer out of him was like trying to lift Mjolnir.

And no one saw Bucky. Sam had gone down at least once a day to knock loudly at the door, ring the bell a couple times, wait impatiently--to no avail. Texts went unanswered, calls straight to voicemail. The only indication that they had that he was even alive was JARVIS’ confirmation that he hadn’t left the building and the steady stream of _Parks and Recreation_ episodes that were being burned through on the Netflix account he shared with Clint.

“And I’m definitely not doing that,” Clint had said. “I would have to never sleep, and that’s an awful thing to think about.”

The week passed, and it was time for a progress meeting on the Chitauri transmissions, and with Jane flying in from New Mexico, they couldn’t just _skip_ it. Not realistically. Minutes could only convey so much on a normal day, much less when Jane was going to be discussing Science.

And they couldn’t hole themselves up forever. That was a fact that everyone had accepted but didn’t feel the need to bring up when they were brainstorming ways to get them to the meeting.

“Don’t make them do something they’re not ready to do,” Maria sighed. If she pinched the bridge of her nose any harder, it was likely to fall off. They had all gathered on the expansive balcony off the common area, leaning over the railing and looking out across the city as if the buildings and traffic had an answer.

“What happens when we have an emergency out-of-the-blue mission, though?” Tony asked. He was furthest to the right in the line of them, and he poked his head out so even Rhodey at the very end could see to give him the _watch yourself_ eyes. “Say, Godzilla rises out of the Hudson.”

“Godzilla?” Rhodey said flatly.

“Yes, _Colonel Rhodes_ , Godzilla. Anyway,” continued Tony. “Say we got the mother of all things reptilian stomping on down Fifth Avenue and we gotta suit up and get with it, get into our formations because we can scramble faster than the National Guard--except they’re still...doing whatever it is they’re doing. What happens to us? What happens to the city?”

“We compensate,” Bruce said quietly, still eyeing the blinking office lights on the next building over. “We’ve won battles shorthanded before.”

Tony frowned and followed the rest of their gazes back outwards. “What I’m trying to say is,” he said again after a few moments, “we need them. And they probably need us too and I’m worried,” he added hurriedly.

“Do my ears deceive me?” Sam called from the other end of the line. “Did Tony Stark just say something heartfelt in front of _people_?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

No one knew how they did it, but the next morning Steve and Bucky were already sitting at the conference table as everyone else piled in, and there was a subtle nod of acknowledgement between Natasha and Maria--so something had to have happened. And they knew that they would never know what it was, at least not for a long time, when the dust had been settled and swept away.

Some awkward shuffling rattled the assembling--any other meeting would have found the two in question along the front corner of the table closest to the windows, but those chairs were conspicuously empty. Steve sat across from them while Bucky chose whichever corner would be furthest from him. Those were Thor and Sam’s seats, and they didn’t argue, but they also didn’t just take the empty spots, which led to some stifled huffs and runarounds.

Jane was running late, and normally there would be the normal pre-meeting chatter about anything other than what the meeting to come was going to cover. That morning the silence pressed in until the air moved like soup around them, and Natasha noticed Clint trying to discreetly fiddle with his ears beside her. She gently laid three fingers on his knee under the table-- _no, it’s not just you_. He nudged her foot, caught her eye--his pinky moved outwards from his temple, followed by an open palm moving from his lips, falling forward at the wrist.

 _Bad idea._  

Before Natasha could respond, Jane burst in the room, and the next two hours were lost to the complexities of Chitauri communication transmissions. With fifteen minutes left before Tony would start complaining that he had really only committed to the allotted time, the slide on the project that everyone had been waiting for pinwheeled into view.

“Darcy must’ve gotten into this before I--oh god,” she sighed. The slide was a bright lavender with dull orange writing in what Bruce identified, cringing, as the Papyrus font. “The information is still good. It just looks--”

“Ridiculous,” Bucky finished.

The way the rest of them at the table exchanged glances, snuck a peek at him and then at Steve to see what, if anything, he would do. Bucky had one eyebrow raised in what had become that _I’m so goddamn done with the goddamn future_ expression, and Steve was peering out the window, which was quite the feat as he was forced to crane his neck around Thor and Rhodey to even see.

“Yeah,” Jane said, squinting at each of them and hovering on Thor the longest. “Did something happen?” Thor started shaking his head, just barely enough to register, but--

“ _No_ ,” Steve and Bucky said at the same time and with just too much of a rough finger on the punctuation key.

Jane surveyed the rest of the table before her--most everyone was doing an excellent impression of Maria pinching the bridge of her nose or Bruce massaging his forehead, except for Tony, who rolled his eyes with a sad grimace, and Clint, who was tapping on Natasha’s shoulder again to repeat his earlier signing with jerkier, punctuated motions. (“Я знаю,” she muttered, making sure he could see her lips. “Заткнись!”)

Thank god Rhodey decided to develop a bit of a cough.

“Anyway,” she said, trying to pull any more information from the scene before her. Thor threw her an apologetic grimace laden with a promise to explain later. Afterwards. As soon as she could hurry up the presentation and get them out of this collective hellhole that they had thought was a great, superb, _wonderful_ course of action. “As I’ve been saying, given the location, trajectory, and type of transmission I had picked up, the likelihood of it actually being from the Chitauri was rather small, _but_ \--I was able to use some data that JARVIS had compiled during the Battle of New York to determine that it was the Chitauri language, but with some syntax and vocabulary differences that could indicate one of two things. Either it’s a transmission from a non-native speaker--or, what’s more likely given a number of different factors, it’s simply a slightly different dialect.”

“What do you mean, different dialect?” Maria asked.

Tony sat up in his chair and cocked back a smirk, and even before he said anything, the rest of the table from the previous night vowed to never take his advice on personal matters ever again. “You know, it’s like when Captain Centennial here calls the fridge an icebox.” _Ever fucking again_.

“You just think you’re a goddamn comedian, don’t you?” Bucky snapped. His head was tilted back, every tendon in his neck strained with the stretching--there was a corner behind the presentation screen he wasn’t taking his eyes off of.

“Not--well, maybe,” Jane said, frowning at the two of them and casting a quick glance at Steve, who hadn’t reacted at all. “The dialect difference would indicate that they had a colony or other outpost somewhere in that galaxy or one nearby. And well-established enough to develop a dialect--which means they weren’t all taken out by that bomb.”

“The threat is real, in other words,” Maria said, pointedly staring behind her.

“Yes. I’m not finished translating all of it, but Darcy and her intern have been helping out with that, so it should be done by next week, and--”

The sound of chair legs scraping against the floor cut her off--Steve and Bucky had both risen at the same time, apparently seeing as the bulk of the important information had been covered. They stared at each other, blank, neither making that first step toward the exit that could risk putting them closer into each other’s path than they would like. After a loaded five seconds, Bucky rolled his eyes and left, Steve following as soon as the door closed behind him.

“Um. What was that about?” Jane asked.

“Tony had a bad idea,” Rhodey sighed, shooting him a look that perfectly conveyed the every other unspoken remark he had wanted to say.

“Thanks, man.”

“If the spade’s a spade.”

Jane cleared her throat. “Good talk, then. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I get any other useful data,” she said to Maria.

The room cleared out quickly after that, only Thor staying behind. There was a pervasive sense of dread hanging about them as they trickled off into their own apartments, into the gym, or elsewhere--it was out of their hands, they knew, but they still found themselves hoping that if the Chitauri were truly determined on coming back to Earth that they would at least wait to send their next correspondence until their meetings about it could be more bearable. Missions were tense enough from the looming threat of death without the thick air stuffing their lungs from the arguments behind closed doors.

\--- 

But the thing about the tension was that however tightly that cord was pulled, something could ease it into hanging slack again, even when there seemed to be absolutely no hope. That meeting was so tense that any movement on the cord sent the whole thing into a vibrating frenzy, obscuring their vision to such an extreme that they completely forgot that it was Maria’s birthday, that it was a Milestone Birthday, and that Thor and Tony had been working for the past month to make it the most ridiculous, over-the-top function that had ever been thrown in her honor.

Given the scene that Natasha walked into, it was likely they had succeeded. The entire open common area on the Tower’s top floor was draped in garish lights tied together with streamers, and they blinked in time with whatever music Tony had hooked up to his custom-made speakers to illuminate the bulbous balloons that brought the normally-arching ceiling much lower. It was only nine-thirty, but the lights were already dim and a crowd had gathered in the designated dance floor where Maria and Sam were apparently trying to outdo each other with an interesting rendition of some dance Natasha didn’t recognize--their cups weren’t sloshing over the edges, so it was safe to say their drinks were encouraging it. And in Maria’s case, they weren’t helping in the slightest.

“You’re not one to show up last to something like this,” Clint said into her ear, holding out a cup of something blue and vaguely dangerous-smelling for her to take.

“I had things to investigate,” she mouthed. Her face was close to his, and the ominous odor of the punch mixed with whatever cologne he had decided to throw on--it was unlike him, and the combination was disorienting. “And now they’re investigated.”

“If you were looking for those two I could have told you they were already here.” With a shrug, he tilted his head towards the back corner by the kegs where Steve was leaning against a wall and then eyed the opposite end of the room where Bucky seemed to be far more interested in whatever snack he had grabbed a handful of instead of giving Tony’s awful dancing the acknowledgement he clearly wanted. “Don’t worry, Sam and Maria volunteered to keep a strategic eye on them.”

“ _That’s_ strategic?”

“You didn’t suspect them, though, did you?”

She grinned. “No, no I didn’t. But it is her birthday,” she added. “So I’m going to let her off the hook for a while. Make sure Steve doesn’t--you know.” Clint squinted, taking another swig of his own drink. “Just in case Sam is actually already wasted. He’s such a lightweight.” And with that, plus a small nod, he hopped over to Steve in a way that let on Clint had already been there for a while.

Bucky didn’t so much as grin at her when she fell into the seat beside him as much as push his mouth into a fine line, but it threatened to break out in full when she nudged Tony into the growing throng before them. “Thanks,” he said, air blowing out of his nose in some attempt at a laugh. “That was--”

“Awful?”

“Incredibly.” Bucky eyed the kegs on the other side of her, big clear barrels that were hoarding more of the blue liquid still untouched in her cup but nearly gone in his. “Think you could…?”

“How much have you had?”

“Just the one, mom.” He downed half the refill in one bulging gulp. The writing on the label confirmed it was of Asgardian origin, which explained the uncharacteristic flush on his cheeks, the higher whirring from his left arm. And also the look he was throwing past the dance floor to the other corner of the room. “It’s hot in here. Can we step outside?”

Spring was supposedly right around the corner, but the night air still held an unpleasant bite.

“If you’re worried about people drinking too much, maybe you should go check on _him_.” He didn’t need to specify. “This shit of Thor’s is strong enough to do something.” He took another deep swig, grimacing as it went down. A shudder, and then another soon after from the cold. “What are you waiting for me to say?”

“You were the one who brought me out here,” she said lightly. She leaned against the railing by the hip, staring at the profile of his face as it looked out over that skyline he could never quite smile at. “Was--”

“I remembered something--or, I think I did...a couple days ago,” he blurted. Shut his eyes. Deep breath, then another. And another. “I thought I was mostly done with all that. Thought I had gotten back all I was gonna get back from the early stuff. And I don’t know if it’s just me making shit up now.

“Steve has those long eyelashes, you know? And it rained the other day, and I got to thinking about how snow would get stuck there, fluff ‘em all up, and then I got to thinking even _more_ about the war, and one night in particular. It snowed the night before I died, did you know that? Even Steve had forgotten. We were camped up in the mountains, and he came in the tent for the night and there was snow all over his eyelashes, and I felt something. I can’t remember if I loved him before, but I know I could have, and seeing him like that, I wanted to ask him to run away with me. Just hike through the Alps until we get to Switzerland.”

The plastic cup had moved to his left hand by then--Natasha wasn’t sure if he realized he was crushing it. The crunching snaps should have tipped him off, but he never paid it a glance.

“But you can’t ask Steve something like that. You can’t ask Steve to desert with you. He’d never look at you the same way again, and he’d wonder what you thought of him that even got you to ask, like there was a chance he’d say yes. I got obsessed with the idea, Natasha. I imagined the whole thing out. The little Swiss town where we’d hide. I would teach him the German I knew and then we could learn the rest together. And he’d be healthy, and I would be better than...than _this_ , and--we could stink the house up with sauerkraut on Sunday nights. Get a dog. There wouldn’t be a war to shove us in.

“But I don’t think I actually thought about it,” he said slowly. “Not then anyways. I think I just wanted a scenario where I could’ve...had some control over when we stopped fight--oh,” he sighed. The cup had finally collapsed into a collection of sharp shards, the last drops of the Asgardian mead sliding down the grooves of his fingers. “Even if we didn’t go down that path. It was still there. We weren’t always going to end up here.”

Natasha opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came--it was more words than she had heard out of him in months about anything, much less anything this personal. And there wasn’t much to say. He’d said so much already, had already poured it all out of him to the point where she could feel the tug of those kegs pulling him back inside to refill. She could get him some water, in a minute at least. His frame had started to sag over the railing, putting all the weight on his forearms, and maybe he was shaking, or maybe it was just another shudder from the wind picking up.

She put her hand over his, lightly at first, gauging if he had even wanted her to notice the shaky breaths, the furtive sniffling. But then deliberately. With purpose. “You can’t always tell what really happened but you can choose what to believe.” With one eye still pushed shut, he tilted his head up to cock an eyebrow. “To an extent.”

“I’m gonna turn in.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

“It’s only three flights down--”

“I’m walking you back.”

She didn’t remember the air inside feeling so close and humid, but it plastered itself against her face all the same--out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bucky wince at it too for a moment, scanning the room for the best escape route. The dance crowd had expanded to where it looked like everyone had been pulled from whatever corner they had been hiding in, even Steve, who was hanging towards the back with Sam. Tony was sitting on top of the bar, legs crossed in the most dramatic way they could be, holding a frothing bottle of champagne above his head. A pair of shutter shades hung precariously off one ear.

“Hold on,” Bucky said. “I want to hear this.”

“I don’t blame you.” Across the mass, she was able to catch Sam’s eye, give him a questioning eyebrow raise. The frown she received in return was never the harbinger of anything good--and the other boot for that didn’t take long to drop. Bucky had already made eye contact with Steve, and it wasn’t breaking, and the mead was whispering terrible ideas into their ears.

“Are you sure you want to stay for whatever this is?” she said quickly.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He didn’t look at her. Steve didn’t move, but Bucky’s brow furrowed deeper with every passing second.

By the time she had relocated Sam, he had turned around to where Tony was fiddling with a sound system, apparently unaware of the starting contest that had erupted--or was about to erupt. This was the simmering, the vibrations under their feet. Animals heading out of the mountains. But they stood there, they all stood there waiting for Tony to win the battle against the feedback screaming in their ears.

“ _Ahem,_ ” he finally coughed into the microphone. “Now that everyone has crossed seeing our lovely Agent Hill drunk off their bucket lists, I thought we’d just keep the ball rolling with--”

“Oh my god, it’s happening,” Clint shouted, vowels stretching unevenly over the liquor on his tongue.

“I haven’t hit play yet, Barton, jesus.”

But he did--the electronic beat bouncing underneath some combination of horns assembled the crowd into some attempt at order, pushing a dance out of every drunk pair of limbs in clumsy variations on a theme. Clint had elbowed his way beside Thor to demonstrate what everyone else was trying to do and--Sam had pulled Steve into the cluster. Sam and Clint were showing Steve and Thor this ridiculous dance, and they were only a little bit helpless, and everyone else was only minimally trying to pretend like they weren’t watching something they’d secretly been hoping for.

Bucky was staring into the core of the crowd. Natasha knew that look, even under the distorting lights casting shadows in all the wrong places. It was falling back on old habits, tossing the empty blackness of your pupils up to the sky to catch the reflection of nothing so you could see what you needed to see, and that was never what was before you. Forming the hypotheticals in a void. A plan. 

Absolutely nothing good. 

“Maybe we should--”

“I’m gonna go join them,” he said flatly. “Could use some fun.” 

It wasn’t the tone of voice for fun--she saw him trace the path to get right to the center of it, Steve and Thor rolling with more confidence, Clint and Tony fist pumping in victory, even Bruce having a moment to just _be_. His jaw was set, and he stretched the muscles in his left shoulder by giving the arm a quick whirl of a rotation. The metal glinted, caught the lights at an angle, throwing it right into Sam’s eyes and only then did he recognize the panic in her thinly-pursed lips. 

“Shit,” he must have said, but she didn’t hear him. Only his mouth moved. He could have been saying something else, more somethings, but she was bent on trying to chase Bucky without actually chasing him, moving to follow his steps through the elbows and knees before the gaps closed behind him. A few toes got stepped on, a couple shoves were had. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sam motioning to Rhodey to move Bruce out of the way, just in case, trying to pull Steve away from some ridiculous collaborative endeavor he had embarked upon with Maria and Pepper, but Bucky still had the muscle memory of a ghost, maneuvered so quietly that he inserted himself at the center of it all without anyone noticing. 

The song changed.

Steve noticed. Maria and Pepper didn’t, not immediately, even as Natasha mirrored Sam’s efforts to isolate the situation. And even as the song changed, as the crowd stopped moving in one fluid motion, the dance somehow didn’t. There was a shift, a beat adjustment, and a flush running down Steve’s neck turning lavender in a blue flash of the bulbs as he realized who was standing before him. She didn’t even think it was because of the dancing--because Bucky _could_ dance, and it often got questionably dirty for a technically-workplace function--but Steve was flushing like it was. Or it was something else. Anger. Another emotion pushing his blood screaming to the surface.

The lyrics were thumping out something about dying young. “Been there, done that, huh, Stevie?”

Steve wasn’t dancing anymore and his firm stance was made all the more apparent by the drunken swaying throwing it in relief, and the lights--Tony was tinkering with the lights settings again--their shifting colors cast a beacon towards the swell of his clenching jaw. He was hard to read like this, when he practically shut down.

Bucky’s brow was set, a shadow over his eyes, and they were dragging down Steve’s face, to his neck, torso, and lower, looking to snag someplace and call it a challenge. And perhaps he found it--slowly his right hand reached forward, twisting along to the beat.

Steve’s eyes flashed something brighter and hotter than what could be reflected around them. “Don’t.”

“Right.” Bucky dropped the act, stood in some rigid approximation of what he saw before him. A mockery, almost. “I almost forgot you don’t want me anymore. My bad.”

“Not here. Not right now.”

“Well isn’t that it, though!” 

There was no going back after the first crank of the volume--and Natasha felt the panic start clenching at her stomach. Of course Sam was lost in the crowd by that point. She didn’t know the buttons to push to diffuse the wildly ticking bomb and the center of this--a nice evening for a nice person and it had the worst fucking timing--

“I figured it out, Steve,” Bucky continued. His words were growing sharper with added volume and punctuation on each syllable, and heads were starting to turn. “Did you think I wouldn’t? I’m not him, am I? Not in the way you wanted. It’s not the thirties anymore, Steve,” he added at a yell.

The music kept going but the chatter died.

“Fuck you, okay? _Fuck you._ ”

Bucky left so quickly that there wasn’t any chance of being able to follow him out, not with everyone standing so still and thick and wondering. Even though they knew, even though they could feel it, that they shouldn’t be directing their silent questions at Steve, their eyes still wandered there, where he was standing--tall and immobile, but with the firmness leaking from his spine and shoulder and down his back, his legs. He dissolved as completely as one could while still remaining upright.

“Sorry,” he muttered to Maria after a long moment of gathering the air to speak. “Happy birthday.” A friendly peck on the cheek, and he followed in Bucky’s wake, or just outside of it.

Natasha felt the air moving in and out of her lungs, but it still felt as if she had been kicked right in the chest, gotten the wind knocked out of her with the whistling vacuum left by their explosive exit. Worry for both of them flooded coldly down her arms and into the bones of her fingers--it was a pulsating hope that they had merely gone back to their separate hideaways, Bucky to their old, shared space and Steve back to her couch. Not finding a spare room to dig their heels in and get right to it, not letting the dust settle and aiming to choke on it instead.

“Someone open the last keg,” Tony sighed. The music suddenly hit a loud swell without him touching it, and she wondered if JARVIS had witnessed it all and felt the discomfort.

“Hey.” Sam appeared suddenly at her side, hand resting on her shoulder. “There’s only so much we could’ve done, y’know.”

“With just now, or…?”

He sighed and cocked his head a few different ways as if he were physically tossing an idea around inside his skull. “Now, yes,” he said after a moment. “And also, just--with the whole thing.”

When Natasha made it back to her apartment, the sun was threatening to start reaching its first fingers over the horizon and Steve was still up, sitting in the dark and illuminated by the glow of his laptop screen. An episode of _Parks and Recreation_ was paused halfway through. 

“We used to watch it together,” he said quietly. 

“Do you want to talk--”

“No.”

A thousand and one ideas came to mind of how to offer something kind, a meaningful buoy to grab onto in the rocking surf, anything--but none seemed appropriate. None fit her hands. So she opted for the familiar, a hand placed lightly on his ruffled hair, an understanding nod, and leaving it be.

(She told herself that the noise she heard down the hall after she had closed the door to her bedroom was just the lingering effects of the party messing with her senses, but fatigue and booze had never been able to sound that lost.)

* * *

 

Something about the future made the nights grow longer--or maybe it was just all the sleeping he hadn’t been doing. The stretch of weeks and weeks with the alarm shouldering him awake in the middle of the night had upset some kind of balance, maybe, because even then, when Bucky had been sleeping through the night on a more regular basis, there were some nights Steve couldn’t get to sleep at all. 

And he could only lie still beside Bucky for so long--he would grow restless, not wanting to shift too much and wake him, but he still had to ground himself in something. Bucky had taken to falling asleep with his head draped over one of Steve’s arms, and Steve would pull his slumbering weight closer, carefully press his face into Bucky’s hair. It didn’t always help. He wasn’t used to the new smells that had braided into the tangles there, even if he had never gotten this close before the war. Every time he expected smoke--smoke from guns and explosions and European battlefields, smoke from welding torches and sawed wood and construction sites. Chugging, spluttering Model-T upgrades hell-bent on running pedestrians off the road. The smoke was never there, and Steve supposed he should be grateful, in a way. At least nothing was burning. Not anymore. Not right now.

Some nights Steve pulled himself out of bed, leaving the door to their room cracked, and padded down to the kitchen. Pulled out a stack of thick, dirt-stained files from behind some books he had never gotten around to reading, not completely. Picked up where he left off, getting used to Fury’s compressed handwriting again.

Maria had given him the files not long after he and Sam had returned to New York with Bucky in tow. “Every Hydra cell he takes out in Europe, he sends me another one of these,” she’d said. “I asked him why, because--”

“He’s still using the SHIELD formatting,” Steve had finished, flipping through the pages.

“He said that wasn’t a part of SHIELD that was broken, so why fix it?”

There had to have been twenty files in his arms, all with uniform labeling in the top left corner on the folder. “Is he doing all right?”

“He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” she’d said. “Did you expect him to tell anyone more than that?”

The files Steve started on that night, a Sunday that was starting to lean into Monday with every passing second--it was from a few months ago. Belarus, some forest east of the capital near the small town of Pyakalin. The exact coordinates were scrawled in their proper place with a different color ink, as if they had been added later.

The gist of it was simple: tailed a man from the airport after a tip from an old army contact out of Krakow, headed straight east until the man pulled over at a dilapidated farm house. Only the chimney could claim to be remaining any bit of upright with the wooden planks of the wall rotting off their nails, a ripped stained mattress drooping over a rusted bed frame. The detail of the scene was almost too much, but the narrative refocused in on the man--tall but heavyset, balding, carrying a briefcase, walking with a limp--and his target, the flung-open cellar doors with a soft light beaconing from below. Fury followed right behind him, silent, until the man descended the stairs and the three others waiting for him asked who he had brought with him.

_Left who appeared to be the second-in-command alive long enough to interrogate. Location had been a safe house through the mid 1970s and then used for record storage until last month. Most files moved to one of three locations: Phnom Penh, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Tel Aviv. Exact coordinates obtained, attached. Last box had been scheduled for pick-up that night, contents also attached. Total casualties: 4, all enemy. Departed Belarus 2/17, 0145 hrs._

There were ink blotches over the names of the cities, a slight tear where the pen dug a little too deep, slight crumpling where Fury couldn’t keep the frustration from spurting forth from his limbs. Twenty-some files, all from Europe--just _Eastern_ Europe, even--and it was just the surface. They must have known he was coming, must have known to start moving their incriminating intel, and what better way to throw it in his face than to move it to three separate locations on three different continents. Eastern Europe was only the beginning. The Hydra cells buried deep elsewhere--start in the Congo and he would find a web stretching from Rabat to Johannesburg, then Cairo to Tehran and Karachi and Yangon, the threads swimming across to Caracas, Port au Prince, and back again to the underground rumblings of Washington, and the war was never going to end.

Steve could have told him that a long time ago.

He thumbed the yellowed pages paperclipped together behind the official report. A quick peek showed all the text in something Cyrillic, Russian or Belarusian or the like, but there was also the hint of a photo corner, and Steve’s veins went cold at the thought of seeing yet another picture of Bucky staring back at him through a foggy window fifty years thick. He turned the page regardless--Bucky wasn’t there, not then. There were two groups of men, their leaders shaking hands, one of their arms emblazoned with the Hydra symbol and the other with one Steve hadn’t seen before, a heart with a horizontal curved line through the center. Flipping through the rest of the document, he spotted no pictures and nothing in any language he could understand, almost relieved but still sensing that lead ball sinking further into his gut.

The clock on the wall read two am, and between the clicks of the second hand it was yelling at him to go back to bed, but not quite in those words, or any words at all. Gentle reminders in the absence of sound, straight from his head in a voice somewhere between Natasha and Peggy: _it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault_.

(But wasn’t it?)

The clock beside the bed read three am, and Bucky was still asleep. It hadn’t looked like he had moved at all, still curled on his side facing the center of the bed. Slowly Steve climbed in beside him, careful not to move the sheets or shift the mattress too much, and watched Bucky’s sleeping face much like he had the morning before a raid somewhere in Hungary--his arm had fallen across Bucky’s torso in the night but he hadn’t thought to move it. He liked where it was, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, watching the slight shift of his feet where he had kicked the blanket off in the night. They couldn’t stay like that forever, Steve’s nudging wake-up call coming quicker than Bucky would have wanted (“I just fucking fell asleep, punk, c’mon”). But it was nice. It was a safe place in their collective history where, just for a moment, he could erase everything else outside their tent.

He could erase everything outside their room for the moment, too. The darkest parts of the morning were good for that. So he lay his arm across the curve of Bucky’s ribs, moved himself closer. Stared at the arch of his eyebrows, sharp lines of his cheekbones, the slow scuttle of his pupils under his eyelids. The lead ball in his gut was still there and seeping into his bloodstream by then, likely, but he was warm there too, and not in the way that he had learned to associate with the dying. Suddenly he was seized with a yearning to kiss his forehead, and--he stopped himself.

“No,” he whispered, freezing when Bucky shifted slightly under his arm--his face pinched, undecided whether to wake up, and his last sleepy movement left him closer to Steve than before, where his face was right in line with a beam from the city lights inching past the blinds. He didn’t get back to sleep, but he could pretend that he’d gotten his full eight hours when Bucky’s stretching accidentally nudged him in the face.

The next night he couldn’t stop his thoughts from barrelling down that path. The initial waves of insomnia pulled him back into the kitchen with Fury’s files by quarter to midnight, but it lay open on the table to its first page for an hour, Steve staring at the words but not bothering to do more than follow the loops in the letters with his eyes. Past the words on the page, Steve could see Bucky’s face, his own hands pressed up along his cheekbones, thumbs grazing the soft skin beneath his eyes. He could feel some force there pulling him forward, not succeeding, but still yanking forth words through his vocal cords, and he could feel the strain despite not saying them aloud.

 _I thought I had lost you and I didn’t. I thought you had died and you didn’t. Do you know what it means to have you back? It keeps me going, Buck. It keeps me going--_

When the image progressed, when that version of himself couldn’t fight the pulling, he tried to shut every eye he had against it--he knew what was coming. He knew the projection of this led to him kissing Bucky and not just on the forehead, and even when he tried to ignore it, he could feel the pressure of skin on his lips. The lead in his gut was churning and simmering under the burns in his chest from sitting too long on the idea of--of what? That he loved him? He had always loved him, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was how--why now, when Bucky was merely trying to survive and find his way to himself again, did Steve suddenly feel _this_? Even fighting it, the image of him holding Bucky’s face in his hands, close, chests flush together, sprung up front and center in his head and he was ready to scream.

He couldn’t scream, and he wasn’t going to. A figure of speech, that’s what that was. He would wake Bucky up if he screamed. He would worry Bucky, and he couldn’t do that. Bucky needed to focus on himself, his own recovery. Not Steve, no--couldn’t be asked to shoulder that extra weight.

The next three files in the stack detail three separate spiderholes on the outskirts of Odessa, and Steve read them all straight through, one right after the other, and didn’t retain a single bit of information. Closing his eyes, he searched for it, anything, how Fury had found the bases, where he had gotten his intel, what he had recovered there, _anything_ \--but all paths led to that morning in Budapest and a hazy pieced-together idea, an alternate history where Steve held the entirety of Bucky against him, and where later both of them lived.

Or rather, he corrected himself, lived the way most people did: in a single line, without chunks missing.

It was five am, and he still hadn’t slept.

It was five am, and he trudged back to bed, slid in beside Bucky, pressed his nose to the top of his head. Lavender, no smoke.

* * *

 

The morning after Maria’s party, the normally vibrant sunrise was obscured by a haze, some spitting mist that was trying to seep through the windows. It was just reaching seven am, and Natasha was looking for a moment to breathe before everyone else pried themselves out of bed to rub away the hangover in the bathroom sink. The mass texts bemoaning headaches and apologizing for questionable behavior would start pouring in, but not until later. She could wait--and she needed to. Coffee first.

She prepared everything as silently as she could manage, eyeing the couch in the living room. The back faced the kitchen door, and a few tufts of Steve’s hair were stuck to the arm that she could see and his laptop was open on the coffee table, blank. But the coffeemaker started its low gurgle--

“You’re up early.”

“So are you.”

“No--” He rolled over, propped himself up so his entire head was laying over the arm and he could attempt his sarcastic frown properly. “ _You’re_ up early because you went to bed. I am up _late_.”

She made a mental note to raid what was left of the old SHIELD and SSR files on the serum’s effects on sleep deprivation. “You want coffee, then?” He nodded, and she pulled down another mug.

“Can I ask you a question?” He was back staring up at the ceiling and Natasha moved to the couch, hoisting up his legs so she could share some of the space. In the back of her head, she knew that this was likely leading nowhere positive or healthy or anything, but it was the most Steve had said to her since he showed up at her door, and she wasn’t about to squash it soon.

“How do you and Clint make it work?”

It wasn’t often that she physically recoiled at words, but she still felt her head lean back, her lips form around words that couldn’t climb their way past her teeth on the first try. “What exactly is _‘it,’_ Steve?”

Deer in the headlights. Mouth agape. Waves of “did not plan for this” rolling off him and down the length of the cushions. Like hell she was going to have this conversation with him right now. Like hell. It wasn’t good for him and--most of all, it wasn’t good for him. Not after what happened the night before.

“I just,” he started slowly, keeping eye contact like she was a grizzly bear he’d stumbled upon in the woods. “I just thought you two were a... a thing. But not publically. The way you’ve acted around each other since I’ve known you…”

And they had been so careful. “Fine. Fine,” she shrugged. Steve sat up and readjusted himself so that they were sitting crosslegged, facing each other in the center of the couch. “There _is_ something. And we make it work because we don’t put a name to it and there aren’t expectations.”

She pursed her lips to close the subject, and he held his hands up to concede. That was all he needed to know. He didn’t need to know the details--what good would they have done him? So she and Clint were close. So they occasionally would have sex in the back of a storage section of the plane extracting them from a mission. So they’d never actually sat down and talked about it. Telling Steve all that would only hurt him, because he would collect all she says in the center of his palm and hold it right up close to his face to see if he and Bucky had just gone about things the wrong way. If they had just kept things simple, just fucked and left all the eyeroll-inducing romance at the curb, maybe they could have avoided it all.

Natasha knew that was a load of bullshit but also that Steve wouldn’t be able to see it as such. He didn’t watch himself and Bucky fall into their relationship like the rest of them had: it never could have been just a nameless, shapeless thing when those feelings were burrowed in their skin in trenches a century deep.

“So you’re not in love with him?” Steve asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Being in love or whether or not you are?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

He searched her face, and she thought back to the hospital after Fury’s supposed death and all the anger lines she didn’t see before her now that were so carefully etched into him then. But his eyes dropped to his hands in his lap, moving with them until one of his hands was covering hers on her knee.

“Because I trust you,” he said quietly, and she moved her hand so she could hold his as tightly as her small bones could manage. “Because I still love him, and I never meant for this to happen.”

“Steve,” she said, using her free hand to tip his head up to look at her. “What _did_ happen?”

There was a buzz from the kitchen.

“Coffee’s ready.” He untangled himself and disappeared around the corner. “You take yours black, right?”

It was a losing battle, and there was an ache in her chest like she had actually been injured, from his hurt and his frustrating lack of opening up about it. Neither of them could sustain themselves with the wounds bleeding like they were. “That I do.”

When he came back with the mugs, he set them down on the table and woke the laptop back up. The Netflix playback time-out page stared back at them. “Do you want to watch _House of Cards_?” She must have made a face because he continued quickly, “It’s supposed to be really good but--but Bucky would never watch it with me because he said Kevin Spacey makes him uncomfortable.” And he laughed, a real couple chuckles pulling the smile up into his eyes before it faded, sunk down out of his face. “I miss him, Natasha. I miss him like hell.” Shook his head, reached to start typing in the Netflix search bar. “So you want to watch some?” he said, coughing.

“Sure.”

He slumped back on the couch and curled a bit to the side, resting his head on her shoulder as the theme music ramped up.

\--- 

_Is Bucky with you?_

Sam watched the little line slide across the top of the screen as the text was delivered to Clint’s phone, but he was only halfway watching it. The rest of his attention was divided among all the things he saw completely wrong around the apartment he was standing in--namely that the front door had been unlocked and that it was completely empty. There were a few other concerning points, like the uncorked half-empty bottle of Fireball on the kitchen counter next to his phone and the clothing strewn in the hallway leading to the bedroom, but Bucky still wasn’t there, and it wasn’t clear how long that had been the case.

“JARVIS?”

“Yes, Mr. Wilson?”

“Where is hell is Bucky?”

“Mr. Barnes left the premises around 4:15 this morning.”

“Wh--did he say where he was going?”

“Not to me directly, no. But he did say something about home.”

Home. Brooklyn, likely. Best case scenario. Worst case scenario--no. Wasn’t going to think about it. Deep breath, then plan of action.

_Dude get up we got a problem_

A buzz in his hand-- _this pair of texts looks bad_ , Clint texted back, and with a follow up, _lobby in ten._

Eleven minutes later, Clint hopped out of the elevator still pulling on his right shoe, cowlicks sticking up every which way, and his t-shirt on inside-out, backwards, and wrinkled to hell and back. “Just one more second, and I’ll be ready to go--”

“Dude.”

“I’m not going to judge you for that dancing last night so don’t say another word.”

“At least fix your shirt.”

They caught a taxi a few blocks down from the Tower, and the ride was quiet for the first couple minutes, save for a couple car horns and Amharic curses out the window from their driver. Every so often Clint checked his phone, presumably for a text from Natasha that would fix the entire situation, but it never seemed to come.

“What were you doing at Bucky’s place this morning anyway?” Clint asked after the seventeenth unsuccessful glance at his phone.

“Wanted to see if he would go running with me.”

“The rest of us are hungover as fuck and you want to go running. You disgust me.”

Rolling his eyes, Sam turned his attention back to the slowly passing line of cars in the other lanes. They were getting closer to the borough line, but there still wasn’t any sign of anyone looking like Bucky along the sidewalk. And maybe they were still too far away from where he could have been, but they didn’t have an exact address of what _home_ could have meant, much less any confirmation that what JARVIS had heard him say was any bit accurate or relevant.

“Did you tell anyone else about this?” Clint asked a few minutes later. The intersection ahead was jammed, a few sirens adding to the cacophony echoing down the street.

“Thought it was better to keep it contained unless it looked more serious.” Telling anyone would lead to them telling Natasha. And telling Natasha would have meant Steve finding out, and Steve finding out--they didn’t need another rehashing of last night, at the very least, but Sam knew that wouldn’t be how it went down. Steve would put aside his broken heart in an unthinking, rote movement and tear the city apart until they found him, and once they did, then the tinderbox would start smoking. A small fire would start, and it would spread until some reporter happened to be strolling past the alley where they had stashed themselves, and soon Steve and Bucky’s faces would be splashed all over the gossip rags in grocery store checkout aisles.

“I mean, it’s already pretty serious. Did he talk to you at all last night?”

“No. Well--” Early on in the evening, Bucky had tried to get Sam to take shots with him, but that wasn’t something that was limited to him. “Not really. Why, did you?”

Another peek at his phone. Still nothing, and Sam didn’t know what he was expecting to see there anymore. “Well, at first he got me to take shots, and I guess I wasn’t the first person to join in the revelry with him because he started going on and on about--well, Steve. Specifically Steve before he became Mr. Universe. It wasn’t super together...probably from the booze and, well. You know.” He sighed. “I tried to find him after he left last night, but no dice."

The cab pulled over, half sticking into the street by an old-fashioned diner. Heart of Brooklyn, near a couple of the streets Steve had mentioned in passing over the years. As good a place to start as any.

“Shit.” Clint scrambled to answer his phone, suddenly buzzing in his hand, and dropping it on the sidewalk a couple times in the process before getting it up to his better ear. “Shit, shit--hello?”

 _There had been an old drug store at that one corner where Bucky would get my medicine when we could afford it_ , Steve had said once. _Right next to a place that sold everything kosher--and a barbershop_. Nothing of the sort remained, no thick canvas awnings, no meticulous paint on the windows displaying the hours of operation. The windows all looked new, unwarped, and those old institutions had been replaced by an art gallery and serve-yourself frozen yogurt shop. If Bucky was looking for landmarks, he was going to get lost.

“10-4. I’ll let her know,” Clint said.

“What was that?”

“Maria put me as point of contact for any news from Jane for today, considering…” Clint frowned, teasing out the best way to put what immediately came to mind. “Considering she knows how mornings after usually go for her.”

“So…?”

“There’ll be a meeting tomorrow. What’s our plan here? Or do you not have one?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Sam sighed. “You’re really one to talk.”

Steve must have been rubbing off on him because he really didn’t have a plan beyond getting to Brooklyn. He would have to tell him one day. He’d be proud.

As they started canvassing the streets, peering down alleyways and into shop windows, squinting at the patrons in line at carry-out cashiers, and not one of them had Bucky’s heavy-footed gait, the slight weight pulling down his left shoulder. Two hours in, they still had nothing to show for it, no leads, but the hour was creeping closer when the group text of hangover complaints would start rolling in and soon someone would realize the three of them were missing. “Hopefully they won’t be able to get out of bed to tell,” Clint offered, but the deadweight of the futility of their mission was pressing down on Sam, and it may have just been a late-coming consequence of the night before, but he was starting to get a pulsing headache right behind his eyes.

“He might just come back on his own,” he wondered aloud. “May already be there.” _May already have gotten himself into trouble--_ but he cut off that line of thinking.

But both were possible, getting into trouble and making it back anyway, hiding cut-up hands and the sickly blooming rainbow crawling across the contours of a cheekbone. He remembered, or he remembered parts. Blinking that first night after being discharged and finding himself in the strip mall up the road from his parents’ house in Greensboro, seeing the Panera Bread that had replaced the indie bookstore, the FOR RENT sign in the old craft shop, the carpet half pulled up and laying against the bare walls. But the restaurant there was still open. The restaurant still had their lights on, people milling about with glasses in their hands at the bar, moving carefree to the music that was barely edging through the thick glass and oaken door. There was something familiar.

And later, there was something even more familiar--the fight, the anger, injuries that wouldn’t receive anything close to a Purple Heart, not here. Just a dumb blond boy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, watching him fall. Just a mother in the morning trying to hide the worried tears in her eyes when he showed up, shrugging off the questions. 

“I mean, we should still keep looking for him,” Clint said after a moment.

“I didn’t say anything to the contrary.”

“Wait--”

And there he was. Sitting on a bench, shoulders pulled up to his ears, staring at the building across the street. He didn’t acknowledge them until they sat down on either side of him. “I was coming back.”

“Can’t be too careful.”

They waited. They waited, and time didn’t quite move the right way around them, warping around the legs of the bench bolted into the cement, and if the seconds were going to twist and fold on themselves into something foreign, it was only appropriate that it would happen around those whose feet were already snagged in it. All of the Avengers knew Steve and Bucky’s actual ages, knew in the same way they knew stars had formed from a collapsed nebulous cloud of gas, an abstract. They only ever saw the sun. They only ever knew them young. But today Sam could feel the sharp angles of decades layered against his bones, protruding from Bucky’s face as he continued to stare across the street.

“So what’s going on, man?” Clint ventured, and Sam shot him a warning look, which he was sure he didn’t catch.

“Steve and I lived in that building across the street when the war broke out,” Bucky said, pointing half-heartedly with his ungloved left hand. The last waning bits of the sunrise caught on his fingers. “They’ve fixed it up. Didn’t used to be that nice. Door looks the same, though. New color.” As he brought his hand back down to his knee, he paused. Brought his hand up in front of his face, twisting it to slide the sunlight down each groove softly clicking as he moved. The moment didn’t last as long as it felt. “Can we go back?”

“That’s why we’re here.” Clint put a hand on his shoulder, stood and offered him a hand up. “I’ll cook you the most massive omelette. If you want.”

Bucky nodded, but Sam saw the way his mouth pursed together for a moment, the almost-sigh that caught in his throat. “That sounds good.”

Clint walked ahead and rubbed at his temple. He was going on about maybe stopping at one of the diners they had passed on their search, old-timey places in pastel mint and salmon vinyl that would have a much lower chance of burning the egg and cheese.

“I don’t think I’ve ever asked you,” Bucky said quietly after a few blocks. “What was it like when you got back from your war?”

“It was too loud and too quiet at the same time.” Sam winced as Clint barely avoided tripping over the base of a lightpost, and he caught Bucky grinning too. “Some doors got repainted. It’s a long story.” Bucky nodded again, put a hand on his shoulder.

They didn’t end up stopping on the way back up to Manhattan, if only because Clint couldn’t settle on a place to eat. Piled halfway on each other in the back of the cab, they rode up the clogged streets in silence punctuated every so often by a venturing inquiry into preferred omelette stuffing--“Just to be prepared,” Clint reassured them--until they were only a few blocks away and their phones started lighting up with the first complaints of the morning.

 _If that was Asgard’s mead, I don’t want their hard liquor_ , Rhodey wrote, followed by a long string of the skull emojis from Bruce. And more. And more. They grinned, laughed at some of Maria’s more atrocious spelling errors that even autocorrect would not attempt to fix.

“The new door color is great,” Bucky murmured to Sam, “but there’s something about that old way home.”

Didn’t he know, and all too well.

* * *

 

Not everyone was needed on every mission, not if they could help it--having a group on-call in case some other emergency came crashing through the city was a smart move, no one was arguing that. But where the lines were drawn in picking teams for missions, that sometimes garnered a frown or two. Bucky hadn’t been on the receiving end of it, not in the same way at least, but from what he could gather it was less about personal egos and more over splitting up what each of them thought were crucial teams. _Take me with you, we’re better together,_ their huffy sighs all pleaded, but to no avail. When Steve was called away, nothing other than the usual pangs of worry clutched at his chest, but with his evaluation coming up the next month to clear him for missions, he knew his time was coming.

Until then, he resigned himself to a week of the Tower having a few more open seats, its halls echoing without the extra bustle to absorb the sound. And the echo was noticeable, especially with Tony and Clint grumping between the common area and the kitchen with impressive regularity, always laden with a bag of chips or six pack of the beverage of the hour.

“Tony set up his game systems on the big TV in there,” Clint said as he passed by, balancing an unsafe number of salsa jars in one hand. “We’ve got another controller if you want in.”

He nodded and followed him, and any attempts at helping him split the load of that leaning tower of a pending disaster were deftly and wordlessly avoided. Even if he didn’t play, he could still watch, and knowing their competitive streaks, it certainly wouldn’t be a boring way to pass a couple hours waiting for Steve to come home.

“Barnes,” said Tony when they entered. “You’ll back me up on this. It’s patently ridiculous Rhodey went with Natasha and Steve without me, right? Bruce going without me I get, I really do, but Rhodey?”

“Doesn’t…” His words still weren’t coming out quite right all the time, and it acted up especially with parts of the future whose glaring, shiny newness hadn’t stopped shooting into his eyes at the wrong angle. “Doesn’t his suit have different...guns?” Tony stared back at him like he had just been grievously insulted. “They probably needed just those guns for this mission.”  It was a flimsy response, but everyone knew better than to mention that they were aware he was being used sparingly for matters like this after the incidents with Killian and the Mandarin.

“Traitors, the lot of you.”

Bucky felt himself grinning and sniffed at the salsa Clint was pouring from a jar labeled with a skull and crossbones. It stung the inside of his nose. “I think it’s more likely that Maria didn’t want everything blown up to hell, though.”

“Excuse me. I only _slightly_ resemble that remark. Bird Boy, pass me the hot stuff,” Tony added. “Okay,” he continued, mouth half full and face starting to flush from whatever pepper the label was warning of in the fine, fine print. “What are you going to lose at today?”

Bucky’s eyes fell on the bright plastic case on top of the pile, and before he could even reach for it to see what it was, Clint said quickly, “No Mario Party. I want to stay friends with both of you.”

The grin grew wider on his face, even as he tried to pinch it back while shuffling through the other cases that they had dumped at the foot of the television stand. Nearly every title started with “Mario” and seemed to feature the same colorful cartoon characters in a wide variety of activities. “I don’t know what any of these are.”

But Clint insisted that he just pick one, they’d show him how to play, he could even watch for the first round, even--he blindly pointed a finger at one of them, Mario Kart, and tried to avoid rolling his eyes at Tony who looked overly thrilled at the prospect. “Why don’t you play Mario Party anymore?” he asked.

“Steve never told you?” Clint’s eyebrows shot up his forehead, and Tony merely shook his head as he turned back to setting up the console. “He was in New York like six months before they found you--some meeting with Fury or something--and before he left we tried to squeeze in a game to help him take a breather, man, because he looked _rough_. But halfway through, this guy”--thumb jerk towards Tony--“steals one of his stars--points, basically--and everything goes straight to hell.”

“Not my fault,” Tony threw over his shoulder.

“You stole a star from a very tired and very stressed friend. Kind of your fault.”

They played through a few rounds with him watching, Clint leaning over every so often to point out what such-and-such button did with whatever was on the screen. It didn’t really interest him much, the racing and flying turtle shells and the like, but he enjoyed sitting with them. Over his past months in the Tower, he hadn’t had much time with the rest of the team without Steve alongside him, and some part of his head had been worried their friendly quips and inclusion was just something to appease Steve. All the same, he couldn’t get Clint’s story out of his head, even despite the positives glowing brightly at the forefront of his thoughts: Steve worn down to the bone, picking uncharacteristic fights with his friends over nothing. Over him. Coming back to some semblance of order after looking under every rock in who knows where looking _rough_ , which had to be worse than what they had been seeing every day.

But Bucky had noticed the slight tinge of purple under his eyes in the morning and how he held himself with a sort of heaviness that was only present along his shoulders in the frayed bits of a memory before the war. It all could be in his head, he knew that because so much still was, but he also knew it likely wasn’t, and he didn’t know how to even start to help if he was right.

“You up for the next race?”

“Yeah, sure--”

“Everything okay?”

He frowned, stared at each of them a few moments. “Yeah. I’m good.”

“Okay,” Tony butted in. “Just so you know, we won’t go easy on you.”

And they didn’t. The first lap, Tony and Clint hit him with enough of those flying turtle shells and bananas that he would have guessed they were targeting him specifically, except the highlight reel at the end revealed their ruthlessness simply extended to everyone who got in their way.

“I have to ask,” Tony said after a few rounds of silence peppered by the occasional flood of cursing. “What was Romanoff looking so smug about last week?”

“Oh, um…” Clint scratched the back of his head. His player was getting carted back to the racetrack after falling off, Tony’s character rocketing past him, and he stifled a groan. “She had been badgering Steve to let her set him up with someone for ages and he always said no. But out of the blue he brought it back up, just to see if she still was offering. She said he seemed a little weird about it but a win’s a win, I guess.”

“Set him up with someone?” Bucky asked quietly. “Like--”

“Like Romanoff’s going to help end the world’s longest dry spell,” Tony said. The grin he shot over at Clint as he won the race was returned with a frown anyone outside their team would have called exaggerated but that they all knew to be quite typical. “And that’s the fifth time I’ve won. Pay up, Barton.”

In the corner of Bucky’s share of the screen, a blue _9th_ sat, and he didn’t want to say it was taunting him, but it was taunting him, and yet another pack of the computer players whizzed past him, assaulting his poor motorbike with every last item in their arsenals, and soon he was staring at a big fat _12th_. “Fuck. _Fuck._ ” The urge to squeeze the controller in frustration rose high in his neck, but he held it off. It was just a game, it was just a goddamn game, and he couldn’t risk breaking the controller with a lapse of attention in the pressure exerted by his left hand. But he still felt the backs of his ears burning. “I hate this game.”

“That’s the spirit!” Tony laughed.

Bucky could see Clint frowning at him, even while focusing most of his energy to shoving Tony in the shoulder.

“I think I’m going to go lay down for a while,” he said quickly. “Thanks, though, for--” He half-heartedly waved his hands towards the whole set-up and turned on his heel towards the door, hoping that the scorching under his skin, spreading now towards the top of his cheeks, was not as visible as he suspected and that they would know to leave it be. They would ask what was wrong, and from the tightness in his chest and the rolling surges coursing down his limbs, metal and all, the only way he could answer their question would be with a nod and an aborted shrug and no words. There was something wrong, but emotions had been coming at him like a semi with the brakes cut since he came back to himself, running him down and leaving him reeling with no way to know which way was up.

And Steve wasn’t there. Steve was in South America with the rest of the mission team, and Steve wasn’t there to be terrible at Mario Kart with him or let him grab onto the front of his shirt for grounding. And Steve was probably going on a date with one of Natasha’s contacts, how _very good for him_.

He was sitting in the center of their bed before he really figured out where his feet were taking him, and that was fine, it was fine, he had just gotten wrapped up in his thoughts. That was it. No lost time.

Steve had only been gone for a day and a half, and his pillow still smelled like him. Absently he ran his left hand over his face and with the rest of his skin prickling, he nearly expected the metal to burn him. It didn’t, and he reached back for Steve’s pillow, pulling it into him.

Steve was going to go on a date. He deserved that.

Bucky pictured him sitting at a cafe table along the street-side patio, tucked away in the corner away from the heavy foot traffic and prying eyes, sharing one of those new-fangled minimalist appetizers with a tall woman with perfectly curled blonde hair halfway down her back. She would laugh at Steve’s jokes, which were always clever but never in a way you could predict, and by the end of the evening he would reach over and carefully hold her hand and push his mouth into a tentative grin, and before Bucky could count to five the wedding bells would have already rung. Two kids and a dog and a shield hung on the wall in the living room.

It seemed right. It seemed right for Steve, and he could never deny that tug.

Even if the scenario kept replaying in his head.

Even if his heart kept smacking against his chest harder with each rewind.

_Stop. Stop. Think about something else._

A couple of blocks away there was a Thai restaurant Steve had been talking about trying--he’d said something about a list he needed to get through--and he had mentioned taking Bucky when he felt up to branching out more with food. Enough remained in scattered patches of his memory to know how Steve reacted eating new things or merely old things prepared in new ways, and against the black of his eyelids he could see Steve fighting the frown, the _I’ve made a mistake_ inching itself across his face. They’d read Thai food was spicy, so the flush and sweat crept from his cheeks all the way down his neck, panic starting to set in, until the moment he would take a deep breath through his nose and realize it actually tasted pretty damn good.

Bucky would fight with his noodles and laugh at a bit of peanut hanging at the corner of Steve’s mouth, and instead of braving whatever was on the dessert menu, they would pick up a pint of ice cream on the way home.

Something felt right about that, too. His death grip on the pillow had loosened, yet the unidentifiable emotions rattling through him hadn’t so much disappeared as collapsed into themselves, pulled back from his limbs and into a concentrated core throbbing right under his breastbone.

“Good god,” he muttered to himself, “you’re such an idiot,” For the first time that day, he was thankful that Steve wasn’t there, and for so many reasons. He didn’t need Steve chastising him for talking down on himself, not when he deserved it this time, because only an idiot would accidentally fall for someone in the state he was in, and only _such_ an idiot would do so with their best friend.

“This isn’t good.”

“Mr. Barnes,” JARVIS’ voice said suddenly, and Bucky jumped a few inches off the bed. “Is everything all right? Captain Rogers asked that I keep an eye out for certain things while he was away--”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine. But…” he added, pausing. “Can I ask you a question? And could you... keep it to yourself?

“Of course, Mr. Barnes.”

“How do you…” The right words weren’t coming, of course they weren’t, of course, and snapshot after snapshot of old New York city blocks taken by his own eyes flickered through his head, catching his mouth mid-word as he talked to some pretty girl on the street corner. Talked in such weaving patterns that the tracks he left behind could be called art. He wanted that back, wanted to show Steve he was still _him_. “How are you supposed to know if you... _love_ someone like a friend or...more than that?”

“I’m afraid that is outside my range of knowledge. I am a computer-based system. The distinction is not something with which I can be programmed. I do apologize.”

“...It’s fine.”

 _Idiot. Idiot idiot idiot--_ if he kept repeating that to himself, maybe he could convince himself to stop feeling these things that could only ruin the tenuous grasp he had on this new life. If he kept repeating it, he could drown out the other thoughts that were clawing their way up from the darkest underside of himself, the side he pretended stayed silent. He didn’t want to hear what the death-rattling gurgle would be saying this time, but he didn’t need to hear it to know. That was a lie he told himself to make it better, to ignore that bit of him that voiced jealousy of JARVIS’ inability to truly feel.

* * *

 

Breakfast was still breakfast even at three in the afternoon, Tony had once argued: as long as it was the first meal of the day, since technically you were still breaking a fast. The low buzz of that memory hung around the feet of the chairs at the communal kitchen table, but everyone that had managed to find their way there was likely considering whether that buzz was just a side effect of the glaring headache filling the vacuum left by that vicious Asgardian mead.

The clock struck two, the toaster oven beeped, and half the table groaned, shoving hands overs their ears to block out the tinny screech.

“Someone please get that before the English muffins start burning,” Rhodey grumbled.

“The timer automatically turns it off,” Bruce said halfway into the tablecloth. “It’ll be fine for a moment.”

“Good. It was going to be dangerous for me to get up.”

“Two questions,” Tony said, voice muffled slightly by Rhodey’s shoulder. “One: feeling this terrible means last night was awesome, right? And two--I’ve always been curious...does the Hulk make you throw up if you start to get alcohol poisoning?”

Bruce would have made to halfway kick him under the table but even the thought of sudden movement made his stomach flop over. “Two answers. One: I don’t remember. Two: fuck off.”

“Point taken, Banner. And--ugh.” Whatever he was about to say collapsed into an uncomfortable frown before propping itself back up again. “I merely wanted to know if Maria had a good time.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

He peeled open one eye--and there she was indeed, head buried in her arms on the table. “Oh. My bad. Well _did_ you?”

“Ask me again tomorrow.”

More time passed--how much, they weren’t quite sure until the clock struck two-thirty, and even that felt a little wrong, either too long or too short or somehow both at the same time, because the very concept of time managed to grow even more abstract and meaningless when the universe was reduced to the churning in your gut. But in that half hour, the hall beyond the kitchen’s swinging door grew loud with fast footsteps and chatter garbled by physical barriers, and finally someone had to ask-- _don’t they know it’s early?_

They heard the door push open, followed a note of surprise that would only come accompanied by a grimace. “Friends,” Thor’s voice called to them in the haze. “Still recovering, I assume?”

“What do you guys distill that shit with, man?” Rhodey grumbled.

“I assure you I can tell you the finer points of Asgardian brewing, but currently we have a bit of a situation--well, _brewing_ downstairs.” They heard the door to the fridge suction open and close, followed by the drearily ominous thunk of glass on wood. “Our mead is strong, Rhodes, but we have ways to combat it.”

Maria was the first to lift her head, and had Thor been more consistently on planet, much less in the Tower, the look she shot the bottles and then him should have been terrifying. “You mean there have been magic hangover cures five feet from us this whole time?”

“Not magic, per se, but--”

“Oh my god,” she groaned, and her head flopped back onto the table.

But whatever it was Thor gave them might as well have been magic, and from the wild look that sprung across Tony’s face as he felt it working through his system might as well have been an omen that Pepper was going to get an earful about bringing the stuff to Midgardian markets. The high hardly lasted--as soon as they rounded the corner to the common area and saw Clint and Natasha signing intensely, mouths pursed and eyes wide, it was almost as if they hadn’t had Thor’s miracle cure at all.

“What’s going on?” Maria asked sharply.

“Long story short,” Clint said, “because we really don’t have time for the long version--Bucky left the tower last night. Sam and I had to go find him this morning. And--”

“And Steve just found out,” Natasha finished.

“We do not wish to have another incident like yesterday evening,” said Thor before the dread could sink even further. He looked over his shoulder and then back at them, worry teasing at the edges of his eyes. “We are attempting to keep them apart for now, though we aren’t--”

“I hope you have a Plan B,” Tony said. “That hasn’t worked for what, seventy years and it’s not going to start working now.”

Whatever anyone was going to try to butt in with held fast to the tips of their tongues, mouths left open slowly closing in resignation. After a moment, Natasha forced through the fog of it to give them the rest of what they knew for the time being: Sam was with Steve in the common area and Bucky, as far as anyone was aware, was still in his apartment where Sam and Clint had left him about an hour ago.

“If Steve is really about to go on some righteous rampage,” Tony said, “it would probably be a good idea for Bucky _not_ to be in the first place he would look? Just a thought.”

There was a sense of futility laden in his words and they were starting to feel it, his first remark sinking in under the weight of his criticism of their current plan, or whatever it was that they had. He was right, after all: two people don’t get separated by war--ripped apart by time and ice and death, torn from each other by a hand massaging memories out of their heads and keep finding each other, keep crossing the void to grab a lonely reaching hand in the blackness there--without something bigger pushing it all along. Maybe they were just stubborn--but they all knew that was practically the same thing.

“Don’t look now,” Rhodey muttered, and of course they all looked anyway.

Bucky was at the far end of the hallway, pausing to cock his head to the side before shuffling up to join them. “Where’s the party?” He looked at each of them, hoping for an answer, and offering Maria an apologetic grimace. None of them did much more than fight the look of discomfort that was fighting to surface, losing out in varying degrees. “What’s going on?”

“Are you feeling all right this morning?” Bruce asked.

“Yeah...I’m fine now. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I--”

The footfalls around the next corner to the common area grew heavier, and they could hear the timbres of Sam and Steve’s voices fighting against each other and merging into something that pulled the worry out to a place where it couldn’t be ignored, and little by little Bucky’s brow furrowed with the weight of it.

Steve appeared moments later, Sam just behind him looking about ready to grab him by the ear and yank him down to the indoor track to run it off. The idea was running through his head, they knew, but the wide-eyed, tight-lipped look Steve was shooting beyond all of them was discounting any contingency plan actually succeeding. It was a look they had all seen on missions, in arguments over methodology and ethics in meetings, and there was something jarring about following that tensing jawline down and not seeing the silver star splashed across his chest.

“What the hell were you thinking last night?” His voice was too calm, too even for whatever was flushing his cheeks.

“I...um.” Bucky glanced at the crowd around them, that Steve had walked into and seemingly not noticed. “Can we not do this here? I mean--” Eyes squeezed shut. Deep breath. Flexing hands, then gathering himself back up. “I’m one to talk, I know, and I’m sorry--to everyone--about the thing at the party last night, but--”

“No, afterwards,” Steve said, and there it was, the first tremor in the vowels. “When you decided to drink even more and then _leave the Tower in the middle of the night_.”

Bucky’s face shifted from confused to showing nothing at all, and he ran a hand through his hair, stopping to pull at the short strands at the nape of his neck. “Oh.”

They wanted to leave. They didn’t need to be there, to see this, to hear this, and any other day with any other argument these two would have had, they would have been long disappeared, scattered throughout the building in faraway corners so they couldn’t bear witness, just like the two of them wanted. Just like what hadn’t been afforded to them in so long. But there was no good way to get to an exit, and for once, with Bucky’s change in how he was holding himself, they weren’t sure they were supposed to leave. There was a record to get straight, or something, but their feet were glued to the floor regardless.

“You were drunk in the city by yourself. You could’ve gotten lost, and--”

“What? What, Steve? Gotten hurt?” He held up his left arm and squinted at him. “You really think anyone in this city could have hurt me?”

Steve blinked, ran his eyes down the gleaming metal, and the resolved anger melted away into something softer before hardening again. “You could have hurt yourself--”

“ _Dammit,_ Steve. Listen.” Taking a few steps was all it took to cross the space between them, until he was less than an arm’s length away, and the rest of them took the moment to step back, maybe against the wall, maybe eyeing a stairwell they could duck into. “Listen. I know I have a laundry list of ‘ _issues_ ,’ but I’m not you. I’m not going to go pick a fight and get beaten to a bloody pulp and not even pack my inhaler.”

They watched carefully as Bucky’s face screwed up with more emotion--anger or hurt or just simple confusion at everything he must have been feeling, which they knew was common--and Steve stood there, blank as ever. His jaw was less tense, brow less stiff.

“You know I don’t do that shit,” Bucky continued. “So--do you want to go there? Do you want to talk about what’s really going on?”

“Bucky--”

“Or are you just going to say nothing’s wrong like you always do?”

“I’m done here.” Steve stepped around him, edged past Clint and Natasha who had been standing by the hall leading down to the elevators, kept his head down.

Not half a second later, Bucky pulled his hands over his face and ran after him, almost acting as if there hadn’t been anyone else in the hall with them at all.

The silence that followed the muted echoing ding of the elevators hung thick and heavy, immobilizing, forcing their eyes down towards their shoes, the artsy design in the tiling. Natasha’s arms wrapped around her torso, fingers worrying at at the notches of her ribs through her skin, and then the calluses of Clint’s fingers were running over her knuckles, just behind her elbows where the others couldn’t see. Eyeing the path the two had taken, now empty, she pulled away.

* * *

 

There weren’t many lights in the hull of the plane--one shone dully through dirt-smeared glass above the jump doors, sealed shut, and the light jumped erratically across their faces when they hit pockets of uneven air.

Bucky remembered turbulence on the flight when he first shipped out to war. It knocked him into the other half-asleep boys fresh from training, jolting them awake, always wondering if the next rattling shudder would be accompanied by a burst of flame and whizzing down into the ocean below. Yet Bucky didn’t remember fear, but not in the way that he didn’t remember so many other things--he had easily thrown out soothing platitudes to the younger ones around him without a single shake in his voice. He couldn’t have been scared then. Here, though, in the hull of the old SHIELD plane, a low bolt of terror was curdling his blood into slush and he didn’t know why. And every time there was a bump, his eyes were drawn to those dirty lights and the fear felt closer, just behind his ear.

He had been cleared for missions weeks ago, and he had agreed that he was ready to try, but maybe he had been wrong.

“Hey.” Steve was leaning in close from beside him, speaking quietly enough that no one else could hear him over the growl of the engines. “You okay?”

“Gonna be.” Steve’s face was so close: so close that Bucky could see the details in how the corners of his eyes pinched up with his grin. He fought the urge to reach out and brush his thumb over it and feel the physical evidence of happiness there. But even more he had to fight to keep his own gaze from lingering too long on Steve’s mouth before he sweated through his stealth suit. “But you know,” he said again, leaning up to Steve’s ear as the plane roared louder. “I was just thinking about--things I do and don’t remember.”

Steve pulled away just far enough to tilt his head questioningly before leaning back in. “I remember getting you that really nice yo-yo for your eighth birthday but I don’t remember much of that Stark Expo. Or even what that one type of flower was that I’m allergic to.”

“I don’t remember that either,” Steve chuckled. “We didn’t exactly keep a lot of flowers around our place, though.”

“Good to know.” He felt himself grinning, showing teeth even, and maybe it was his imagination or the shadows pooling in unfamiliar places, but Steve’s face seemed to light up as well. Warmth glowed just below his ribs and his blood started melting, flowing right again without the icy blocks of dread.

Sam cleared his throat from the other side of the hull. And then again, louder, until Steve turned his head and could properly see whatever face Sam was making at him. Bucky didn’t catch it, eyes not focusing in the dark fast enough, but after a moment he could at least make out the lines of Clint’s snoring face against Sam’s shoulder. Natasha was on Clint’s other side, arms crossed.

“We’re crossing the border,” she said loudly over the engines. “Bienvenidos a Ecuador.”

“You know Spanish, too?” Steve asked and he only got a smirk--or what Bucky thought was one--in response.

The light was still there, flickering with the latest jolting pocket of air through the grime, but he tried not to look at it. If he turned his head just so, he wouldn’t be able to see it, and he could see the edge of Steve’s profile--something to hold on to, at least, even if he didn’t understand why he needed it. The plane was plenty sturdy, Tony had reassured them, and the mission was plenty simple. Most everyone had already done the hard parts the last time Maria flew them down there: this was just a follow up, he reminded himself. An item extraction, and they knew exactly where it was, had eyes on it to ensure that it was still there. Steve and Natasha would infiltrate the building with him, Sam, and Clint positioned to watch the perimeter. In and out and back in New York in time to catch the premiere of “Top Chef.”

“Clint, wake up.” Natasha nudged him a couple times before he sat up grumbling. “We’re going to be over our drop points in the next thirty minutes.”

“Already?”

“That’s what happens when you sleep most of the flight,” Sam said. He stretched his shoulder and arm, no doubt wincing at how it had gone numb under Clint’s head.

Natasha unstrapped herself from her seat and began to distribute the parachutes, jokingly offering one to Sam. They didn’t seem nervous at all, like it was just a routine--get up, brush your teeth, parachute into a covert mission in a foreign country, curl up with reruns and tea--and he supposed it was to people like them, and he included himself in their numbers even though he still couldn’t get his nerves to cooperate. But Steve’s hand was on his knee when Natasha turned back to go check with Maria in the cockpit, and it was okay, it could be okay.

“Guayaquil’s nice this time of year,” Steve said, and the warm pressure on Bucky’s knee turned somehow until he was patting him there, just like he seemed to recall Gabe doing whenever Dernier would rant in French for just a little too long. “You’ll like it.”

“If by ‘nice,’ he means ‘hot as hell,’ then yeah, Guayaquil is plenty nice,” Sam said. He was talking to Bucky but he still didn’t turn from Steve and his eyebrows, darker lines in dark shadows, inched up his forehead.

“It’s a good change of pace then,” he shrugged, and Sam finally turned his way. “There were some days I thought I’d never get warm again.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he sensed the waves of concern rolling off the tight frown Steve was already wearing. “During the war,” he clarified quickly. “Don’t you remember that one mission we had in...you know--”

“Prague?” Steve finished, sighing. “With the freezing rain and the holes in our tents from the mishap with Dum-Dum’s gun? Yeah, I get what you’re saying. That wasn’t a fun night.” He let out small chuckle and shook his head, profile still glowing from that lone light, and his hand came back to rest on Bucky’s knee.

Bucky could ignore his heart leaping up his throat and to the back of his tongue--what Steve had supplied was running his head in loops trying to grasp any bit of it that had clung to the inside of his skull. There wasn’t anything left about Prague or Dum-Dum’s gun, but he could pretend long enough to act like that was what he had been referring to. Not the lingering chill that still stuck to him half asleep in the morning and had him panicking before burying his nose into the bone at the center of Steve’s chest.

“Jesus. Someone wake Clint back up,” Natasha said, her head sticking out of the cockpit. “Drop points are coming up, and remember--”

“Don’t goddamn miss them this time,” Steve and Sam recited like bored schoolchildren. “There’s a fucking lighthouse on that hill so don’t blow our cover again, geniuses.”

“What they said,” Clint grumbled. Natasha had already strode across the hull to shake him by the shoulder, and he tried to fight her off--half-heartedly, of course--only to have his parachute pack shoved in his face.

“Wait--again?” Bucky glanced at Steve.

“Um…” He busied himself with peering under his seat for who knew what until Natasha dropped a pack in front of him with a slight shit-eating smirk. And then he just busied himself with the straps as if he was looking at the chicken scratch notes Bruce left around his lab. “We were supposed to land in certain spots in the river down there and we--well, we sort of _didn’t_ so the lighthouse revealed our location as we dropped. It wasn’t that big of a--”

“We had twenty-five people waiting for us on shore when there should have been none,” Natasha said quickly. “And it won’t happen again.”

“Right,” Steve shrugged. “No harm done.”

“You failed to mention that to me when you got back, though,” Bucky said, and he saw a flash of a smaller Steve pass before his eyes. The shadow was shrugging off a black eye as he dabbed at it wordlessly over their dingy kitchen sink, and the look on his thin face matched the one Steve was giving him now almost exactly.

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Hash it out later, boys.” Natasha stood under the door with the light and smacked it a few times until it glowed a little brighter and stopped flickering with every bump. The door opened with a familiar roar into the night, and the dots of light were lower than he expected them to be--they weren’t stars, he soon realized, not with the cloud cover, but illuminated windows of riverside houses. From that altitude, it seemed peaceful, no matter what was actually occurring on the ground-- _or about to_ , he added before he could stop himself. Bad habits he still couldn’t quite fight.

Clint and Sam jumped first, and Bucky hung back at the ledge. Toes curling into nothing, hands splayed across the inside edges of the hull holding him back, waiting for the green light from Natasha. She was arguing with Steve behind him about his parachute in hushed tones that guaranteed he wouldn’t hear everything--

“I just don’t understand,” Steve said, “when everything got so _complicated_.”

She was muttering something he couldn’t quite make out while the clacking of the buckles and whizzing tightening of the straps garbled it further. “Just think, if you wore these more often, you’d actually know how to put them on.”

“What do you mean _if he wore them more often_?”

“You’re going to miss your drop--”

“Steve, stop. Do you _not_ wear parachutes?”

“I’m wearing one now!” He grimaced and pointed over Bucky’s shoulder. “If you don’t jump in the next few seconds, Nat’s going to kill both of us.”

He hoped Steve got a good look at the frown he shot his way before turning back around, or at least a passable sense of what it was in the dark, and it was always the same goddamn thing, wasn’t it? A reckless Steve and leaping into some unknown chasm with a hope and a prayer strapped to his back.

When he landed--a deafening splash followed by a different sort of deafness, a close nothingness--the river was grimy but swimmable, and Clint’s hunched over figure on the shore was as clear a beacon as he needed.

“Sam’s already in position--are you okay? Did you land funny?”

“I’m fine,” he said shortly. “Is this Torre the Point?”

He couldn’t have imagined that it was any other building around them--aside from the hotel between them and the lighthouse, it was the only thing there that could have possibly had a thirtieth floor for this mystery item to be on. Bucky thought the architecture was wildly out of place, a modern office building whose edges didn’t go straight up, but instead twisted in a mild corkscrew as it jutted into the sky.

Both of them were assigned different sides of the building, watching the entrance and scores of dark windows--just in case. Maria had assured him that it was only a formality, that most of the threat had been taken out the first go round and that the complications upon arrival--his blood flashed hot again at the thought--had prevented them from extracting the item then. Having five of them was technically overkill.

But overkill or not, Bucky set up his scope behind a pile of abandoned construction material haphazardly covered by a ripped tarp and waited. Clint’s sighing and grumbling was becoming more and more audible in the comms until he finally asked after an hour if Sam had laid eyes on the last two members of their party.

“No visuals yet. They were being dropped further up the Malecon and heading down from there. Should be soon.”

Ten minutes later Steve and Natasha’s unmistakable profiles moved silently past the front double doors and back out of sight, only the silver star on the shield keeping them from fully melting into the shadows. The seconds ticked by like hours without any comm links on the inside--too risky, Maria had said on the briefing before takeoff, not after what happened last time. They would have ear pieces so Maria could speak to them in the most dire of emergencies but nothing else.

And not knowing was so much worse than knowing every tiny detail. It was so incredibly _agonizing_.

“I see you fidgeting down there, Barnes,” Sam’s voice said in his ear. “Everything’s going to be just--”

A couple sharp flashes lit up a dark window somewhere around the ninth floor--no sound penetrated the glass, but with his scope refocused there, Bucky could barely make out the silhouettes of three bodies crumpling to the ground, two pairs of feet hopping over them and around the corner. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“See?” Sam said. “Totally okay.”

“I’ve found singing ABBA’s greatest hits to myself helps in times like these,” said Clint.

“Don’t listen to Clint. We’re doing fine. This is a damn walk in the park.”

Bucky’s chest had grown tight again and he sucked in another lungful of air as silently as he could manage. “Just wish I had a twenty on them,” he muttered. _Just to make sure his dumbass doesn’t do anything stupid_ , he added to himself. Natasha could take care of herself, but Steve--he still didn’t have any accessible memory of Steve in the field since the war. Maybe he had learned to check his six more often, to carry his weight so he wasn’t stomping around like an elephant. And maybe he hadn’t.

Time continued to move forward immeasurably. At regular intervals of however long, Bucky’s muscles would get a buzz about them, a warning that they would start to tense up, to cramp, and that old panic from the plane and that lone light flooded back over him. Sam would call him out from his hidden perch on the roof when his squirming was too visible and the cycle would begin again.

“Wilson, Barton, Barnes,” Maria cut into their comms suddenly. “Rogers and Romanoff have retrieved the container. Prepare for extraction.”

Bucky snapped his scope back up to the top floors and peered through the crosshairs, squinting to get his eyes back in focus. Nothing, not a glint on the back of his shield or glow from her widow bites, and not even a swath of black that shifted against its just-darker backdrop. The sweat that had beaded at his hairline rolled down his temple, slowly, and he couldn’t afford to bring his finger from the trigger to wipe it away.

A window on the thirtieth floor shattered and a figure was flying through the air, legs pumping uselessly beneath him-- _him_ , because Bucky could recognize that _oh shit_ look from anywhere, even thirty stories down and in the dead of a thick tropical night. Steve had one arm wrapped around a squat rectangular box and the other flung up above his shoulders.

“Don’t _tell_ me he’s trying to land in the river,” Maria yelled. “Jesus Chr--”

Sam was already halfway to him, wings tucked tightly to him and zipping down Steve’s arcing path to the Guayas, cursing violently into his ear over whatever other questions Clint was lobbing into the mix, and they followed their course even with the rifle and bow pointed right at the jagged hole left in his wake. Sam pushed out another burst of speed, outstretched his hand--

There was a splash, a gargled, muffled _oof_ as limbs splayed and briefly sank into the water. Steve’s head broke through the surface a moment later, the comms immediately overloading with groans mixed with relief and frustration.

Looking back toward the building, Bucky spotted Natasha’s red hair, a hand coming slowly down her face before rubbing her temples, and a few black-clad bodies falling to the ground with arrows in their chests. “All clear,” Clint said.

And then Bucky was in the water--he didn’t quite remember moving, consciously tossing his gun on top of the tarp, but he was there wading through the slimy river bed and waves of brown water lapping up to meet him and grabbing onto the front of Steve’s suit. The asshole was _grinning_ at him. One part meekly, but at least five parts far too pleased with himself as he held up the spoils. “Got it,” he shrugged.

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

“Had to get out somehow.”

“I’m sure there were other ways you could have gone.”

“Not entirely--”

Bucky tightened his grip on the suit and pulled him closer, their noses within inches of touching each other. Steve’s grin faded slowly, and Bucky watched carefully as his eyes crawled all over his face. His limbs were caught between shoving him away and staying angry or--closing the distance, because as upset as he was, he was more grateful he was alive and the concept still felt so new, them being alive here together, and he just wanted to shut up whatever explanation Steve had to offer. _It’s fine, it’s fine, you’re still here to make me sweat, and that’s all I need._

Steve reached up with his free hand and latched it around Bucky’s wrist, dragged it up so his fingers too were gripping at the bunch of his uniform stuffed into the metal palm. His mouth opened and closed, and Bucky could still hear him breathing heavily over the wind that had picked up, rattling the palms along the shore. Adrenaline still pumping from the jump. No doubt some excuse was being readied and Bucky was going to swallow it before it could escape, lap it up right off Steve’s tongue so he didn’t have to hear it.

In theory.

His heart thumped louder with Steve so close and the watchful eyes of the rest of the team, and the entire mission replayed in his head with that first anger boiling up behind it. One blink and he was sloshing back to land trying to get his breathing back under control, trying to identify the specific currents of emotion under his skin. It was all still so hard.

“Bucky.” Sloshing started up behind him. “Buck, _wait._ ” Maria was talking in their ears about the incoming extraction, but it was fuzzing over, not quite processing. “The stairwells were blocked. We had our back against the wall and needed to get the thing back to Maria so--are you even listening?”

“Yes, okay?” He turned around and recoiled slightly when Steve was back to being a few inches from him instead of where he had been standing. “You don’t have to _do_ that all the time. You don’t always have to take the stupidly dangerous way out.”

“But I can--when others can’t!” he said, motioning behind Bucky to what he assumed was Natasha. “I can do the stupid things and _live_ \--”

“What if you _don’t_ one day?” His voice was climbing up his throat as the volume grew and pitch tightened, and he knew he should keep his mouth shut. The night may have been stiflingly thick but that didn’t mean sound couldn’t still travel and that they weren’t still in some form of danger. Maybe he wanted them to hear it. “You’re strong but you’re not invincible. If you misjudge something what am--what are we supposed to do then? Why are you so unbothered by _dying_?”

Whether Steve had an answer for him or was going to continue gaping at him he wasn’t sure, but the comms started crackling and the grumble of the plane’s engines grew louder above them.

“Ride’s here,” Sam said.

There was a split second where the possibilities seemed without limit and the whole of the Guayas River felt as if it were going to seep right through the earth, taking the weight of everything with it so he could say something better. So Steve could understand. But it was only a split second and Bucky’s thoughts still tended to jam at the worst possible moments. They boarded last, dripping all over the hull, silent to each other the whole way home.

Somewhere over Cuba, Clint started humming “Mamma Mia.”

\---

If he were being honest with himself, it was really a stupid idea--and if he were going to be painfully, excruciatingly blunt with himself, it was probably one of the worst ideas he had ever had.

This wasn’t going to be a thought he would share with anyone else, though. To hear Steve Rogers admit that he had _one_ stupid idea just paved the way for goading him to admit to even more down the road, and he certainly did not want to hear the long, long list of ideas he’d not only had but followed through on that everyone else counted as in the running for his Hall of Shame. In what world, Sam or Natasha or any of them would argue, would jumping out of a plane without a parachute lose to standing in a florist shop?

“Only if my brother had made it opposite day,” Thor would say into his coffee, and that would be that.

They had landed from Ecuador that morning, and Bucky had retreated to their apartment without a word, not even waiting for Maria to give them them the official debriefing. The sun was high in the sky now, clock ticking into the afternoon, and while he still hadn’t emerged, Steve wasn’t too keen on seeing him alone until he had something to say.

Or flowers.

(It truly was a terrible, terrible idea.)

He pretended to study the arrangements tucked away in the inset chilled shelving but he was still back on the plane over the Caribbean in his head--his thumb ran over the thick petal of a daffodil, and he thought of Bucky’s mouth close to his ear, how it brushed up against the ridges during one of the many jolts of turbulence.

The entire flight had almost been too much. Even in the cool air of the florist, he was starting to flush, and he couldn’t count on the store being so empty for much longer and having someone catch Captain America looking at the roses with a face as red as one.

 _Captain America Looking Wracked with Guilt, Staring at Bouquets: Has the Avenger Finally Met His Match?_ : the gossip columns would have gone wild with a story like that. The inside scoop--what was really going on in the head of this morally upstanding beacon of justice, as Tony so often liked to call him, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t a great place to be at the moment because “wracked with guilt”? The imaginary reporters definitely nailed that one.

He tried not to think about how Bucky stared at him while they stood in the Guayas together and how their hands had overlapped and clutched into each other in what he thought as some desperate attempt to correct the wrongs from the Alps all those years ago. He didn’t want to remember how familiar that look was and how thickened with decades it had become, distorting it like a funhouse mirror into something more acute, more pained at the core. And the guilt piled on higher as he dug a knuckle into his hip muscle--he would have given anything to erase that moment from his head, when the opposite was all Bucky had been fighting for since he came home.

But Steve didn’t want to think about it, so of course he did nothing but.

He walked out the shop with a single sunflower, the stem wrapped carefully in a few sheets of colorful plastic that he quickly abandoned in the first trash can he saw. Five steps later he wasn’t sure why he did it--was Bucky going to think that he had picked it himself from one of the plethora of sunflower gardens in downtown New York City? He hadn’t thought the idea could get any worse, but there was always room to surprise himself.

“Good afternoon Captain Rogers,” JARVIS greeted as he stepped into the Tower lobby.

“Is Bucky still in our apartment?”

“No sir,” the voice said after a moment. “He appears to be in Conference Room D, actually.”

“Thanks,” he frowned, sliding into an elevator and hoping fervently that he didn’t have to answer any questions about just why he was holding a flower and--sure thing, he saw as he squinted at himself in the reflection of the elevator walls, blushing like the fate of the world depended on the deep crimson hue in his cheeks.

But he saw no one, heard no soft babbling from behind the kitchen door or crashes from Tony and Bruce’s lab, and he held the sunflower a bit more boldly before him as he stepped towards the cracked door to Conference Room D. His heart started slamming against his rib cage and the feeling was almost comforting under the tensing nerves--a call back to earlier days when an alarm in his chest meant everything was functioning as poorly as normal.

When he side-stepped inside, Bucky was sitting on top of the conference table, cross-legged and holding his head in his hands. “JARVIS told you where I was, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Traitor.”

“Do you want me to leave? I just--”

Bucky picked his head up and glanced quickly between Steve’s face and the flower that was suddenly getting the death grip treatment--the squeeze of his knuckles was crunching the stem and sending water down the grooves of his palm.

“I’m sorry that I upset you,” he said, holding the sunflower towards him.

He took it from him gingerly, making sure to grasp it above the dangling end below where Steve had accidentally damaged it, and brought it close to him. The yellows cast a glowing halo around his face.

“But not for the stunt you pulled.” Bucky kept looking into the dark center of the sunflower and the yellows only grew deeper along his forehead and cheeks, dipping into the hollows and sharpening the blues in his eyes.

“No. Not quite,” he said quietly. He hadn’t been planning on being quite that brutally honest, but Bucky had asked, and Bucky had sat there so simply with that halo and maybe the gold there wasn’t as intense as how he was seeing it, but he certainly felt it. He felt it in his bones, in every bit of marrow and blood and bond keeping his atoms together. And he couldn’t lie to him. Not like this.

Bucky took a deep breath with his nose buried in the flower, waited for a moment before a grin could twitch up the corner of his mouth. “Looks like this isn’t the type of flower I’m allergic to.”

“I guess I’ll try a different one next time.”

“The hell are you talking about, punk?” he laughed. “You really want me sneezing all over the apartment?”

“No, I--” He ducked his head and shuffled a few steps to the wall, leaned against it. When he looked back up, Bucky had shifted so he would still be facing him, but with his legs dangling from the table, stretching towards the floor. Steve’s breath caught in his chest with the grin that had grown and looked so easy with the flower held lightly between two fingers of his left hand. 

“You what?”

“It’s… it’s not something you or I know about you, so… I thought it could be something we figure out together.”

There was absolutely no way that his face was anything but beet red but he didn’t turn away from Bucky’s piercing squint as his grin crawled across his face.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you just wanted an excuse to buy me flowers.”

“There was maybe a little of that too, yeah.”

It had slipped out, and this wasn’t how he had wanted it to go. Or perhaps it was, he wasn’t completely sure, and the verdict kept changing its mind every half second--and then every tenth of a second when Bucky didn’t stop staring at him so intensely. That same look that had gripped him on the march back to camp after rescuing him and the 107th but with a glint of something brighter there. The intensity was the same. The immobility of the gaze. How it kept wrenching him back any time he thought about looking away. 

“Did you ever learn how to dance?” he said, and then he was on his feet, taking a few steps closer until he could have lowered his voice to murmur and still have Steve hear every word.

“Not in the way you’re thinking, no.”

“I don’t know if I remember that either. Do you think...maybe…”

Bucky didn’t finish his thought, cutting himself off to grab Steve by the back of the neck and pull him into a kiss--closed-mouthed and brief, but still leaving him reeling as they pulled apart. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think beyond the impression Bucky’s lips had made on his own, the phantom touches at the top of his neck--

“I’m sorry, oh god, I--”

But Steve couldn’t stop himself even if he wanted to: leaned back down, kissed him again, let the surprised squeak get swallowed by the humming in his own chest and the soft moan that could have belonged to either of them. His hands rested on the sides of Bucky’s face, cupping his jaw, pulling him closer and stumbling back until they hit the wall.

He tried to kiss him the apology he deserved. Opened his mouth against his, touched his tongue with his own. Felt Bucky’s hands along the small of his back, creeping under his shirt. _I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I’m this way and it’s the way that will worry you and always has._ He wanted to kiss it into every inch of him so even if he couldn’t get the words out it would still be a part of him, and then he’d realize.

Bucky gasped into his mouth with one finger hooking into a belt loop and the other crawling up the notches in his spine, and he was saying something that sounded like his name, _Steve Steve Steve_ , but it was muffled in the enclosed space between them. The newness of their lips pressed against each other, their hands gripping towards unknown skin--

The apology could wait. He loved him, he loved him and he had forever to apologize--the universe had proven that to them with their second chances--but he also had forever to love him. That was the forever he wanted to give him. That was the forever he deserved.

* * *

 

Bucky caught up with Steve in the long stretch of hallway leading to the Avengers’ apartments, pausing to catch his breath. Steve was standing in the middle of the hall, arms loose by his side and staring at some nondescript bit of the floor where it met with the wall. After a few moments, he sighed and turned around, still frowning. “All right, you caught me. I didn’t know where I was going.”

And there it was: the type of petulant admission only the most headstrong could deliver with such consistency, with such a tightness in their words. A laugh started to rise in Bucky’s throat and nearly escaped, and he masked it, forcing it past a frown and turning it small, angry. Because that’s what he was then, wasn’t he? Angry. Small before whatever it was they hadn’t said to each other.

“We’re not having this conversation out here. Come on.” He jerked his head and started walking to his place-- _their_ place, at most points, though not this one--and Steve followed. The door snapped shut behind them, Bucky leaning against it and staring at Steve, willing him to stop pretending he was so preoccupied with the toes of his shoes. It didn’t work, and a small voice in the back of his head told him that it never had.

“Y’know, you’re _so_ worried about me--” Finally Steve looked up to meet his gaze. “You’re so worried about me and you’re the one who led us here.”

“I know that, Buck.” It was quieter than he expected. Softer.

“What is this, then?” He motioned between the two of them, took a couple steps forward, and his mind’s eye was barraged by image after image of the two of them: before the war, in school and in their drafty apartment, and during, with flames scorching the soles of their boots as they ran and slush leaking in the holes they’d worn down. Silent looks exchanged over a marked-up map laid out over a jeep hood, laden with something heavy whose name he’d lost in the decades since. He overlaid the bits that had come back with the weeks since the day it had ended, and nothing matched up. He had nothing. He had nothing and he was lost again. “You’ve always been there, and now--”

“You know that’s not true.”

“ _Jesus,_ Steve--you were in a hunk of ice.” Deep breath. Recollecting thoughts. “You’ve always been there and now you’re throwing me out because--what, because you don’t want to be there anymore? That’s pretty much what you said, right? But you still ream me out because you’re _worried_ and _still care_ and I want to know if you’re going to make up your goddamn mind.”

“Bucky--”

“Which is it?”

“It’s not that simple!” And he was yelling now, but Steve never yelled with volume; it was the forcefulness of his words, how every syllable came punctuated off his tongue, and it had all the same force.

Bucky tried that tactic sometimes, but it never embodied his point quite like straining his vocal cords and filling up the room with it all. “And why isn’t it? It used to be, didn’t it? That’s what I remember. You and me. You and me in the schoolyard. You and me in detention and living together and going to war together--you go, I follow. I go, you follow. And now it’s complicated? You said it wasn’t because of Eritrea, so what did--” His throat was trying to close up, squeeze the stinging from the corners of his eyes. “What did I do?”

Steve looked like he’d been shot. Stared down at his shoes again, then meandering towards the arm of their old overstuffed sofa, and he didn’t so much sit on it as fall. “Do you think we’re still the same people after everything that’s happened?”

“You obviously don’t. I know that much.”

“I just don’t think you realize how different it is,” he snapped. “To live here, in this century, with everything that happened while I was in the ice. And--” His face screwed up for a brief flash in frustration, aiming the low pinch of his mouth at his shoulder, inwards. “And how different you are. You were right last night. You’re not who you used to be, and I don’t think there was any way you could’ve known that, considering--”

“What the _fuck_ , Steve.”

“All I’m--”

“No.” His skin felt white hot, and not in the good way--it was the kind that Bruce could recognize across a room and diffuse with an offer of tea or yoga, the kind that flared up when he sat too long and thought too hard on what still wasn’t blocked out from his time as the Soldier. It shot through him, straight through his bones until he was sure they were going to disintegrate and leave his body to crumple to the ground. Instead it only pushed him forward until he was standing at arm’s length from Steve. “You don’t get to say that to me. _You_ think living here is hard? _You’re_ going to give me a lecture on that?” He watched as Steve’s lips parted slightly, came back together as if they were trying to swallow up words he’d regretted. “I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to whatever idealized memory you had of me before we both went under.”

Bucky had tipped over an edge and was rolling down the steep slope, gathering speed and crashing through briar patches--burrs stuck to his sides, pricked at the pressures bubbling up under the stiff immobile stance he held, silent, for half a second, before he barrelled out of his own mouth again. “What the fuck was the point of me coming back if I was going to lose you again?”

Steve stood, and Bucky felt his mouth snap shut of its own accord. “Don’t,” Steve said, slow with extra care on each letter as it passed over his tongue, “say that to me again.”

“I thought you were all about the truth.”

In one moment, with Steve taking in all the air around him to stuff the sparks of ire back down his chest, Bucky saw his face grow thinner, the skin more sallow, and he seemed smaller even while staring him down from the mere inches he had on him. It was the look Steve threw on like a shield before he had a proper one, right when he was about to sock the unlucky goon in the jaw with knuckles already looking to crack.

And as angry as Bucky was, he knew if Steve was about to punch him, he probably deserved it. But he couldn’t stop. The momentum was already too far gone. “How did you let yourself fall apart?”

All at once fingernails were digging into the back of his neck as Steve grabbed him, roughly pulled him forward until their mouths met in a loud clack of teeth and Bucky’s own hands were reaching blindly around until they found purchase in Steve’s hair. An anchor to hold as the waves crashed around him--Steve’s teeth burying themselves in his lower lip, under his earlobe, down his neck and back again, holding back an irked almost growl when his head was held still as Bucky mirrored him. Digging in here, here, here. Above a hollow near his collarbone. Pressing against the muscle around his Adam’s apple. Marks sinking back into the skin almost as soon as they bloomed.

A couple uncoordinated steps and Steve fell over the back of the arm of the sofa, Bucky dropping on top of him, landing with knees on either side of his chest trying to burrow between the notches in his ribs. He held Steve’s bottom lip between his teeth, his jaw between his hands, then one hand--grabbing tightly at his face as the other fumbled carelessly with the buttons on his shirt.

Steve was already panting and breaths were starting to catch in Bucky’s throat--the anger roiled through him still but it sputtered and struggled against the want dragging his hands and mouth back down to whatever exposed bits of Steve he could grab onto. Dragging his attention to the two strong palms wrenching him forward by his ass.

_This is going to be the last time he loves you like this._

He bit back the _shut up_ perched at the back of his throat, busied himself with ripping Steve’s shirt open and biting a little deeper into the muscles something kept telling him were so out of place. Deeper as if the dark blotches would stay and insist _Bucky was here, and here, and there, and it mattered._

Of course it mattered, he could tell himself that--distract himself with the thought as their hands fought each other to scramble pants off each others’ hips--even if it didn’t matter in the way he had sometimes let himself hope it would. This, the hands on each other, gasping into each other’s open mouths, it had only mattered because it was the end. He knew this now. They’d somehow done to each other what war and time and every other force on earth couldn’t.

As soon as it was over, Bucky peeled himself from Steve and threw on his clothes without looking much at anything beyond the reach of his hands. His bare feet felt too loud on the wood floor, and the doorknob surely could have been oiled to avoid the metallic scraping as it turned. And halfway through the door, he looked back.

Their eyes locked and fell away, some part of Bucky tumbling after as he closed the door wordlessly behind him.


	2. Part 2

Just as Clint had predicted to Sam, Maria gathered them into their designated conference room like a sheepdog herding a particularly stubborn flock first thing the morning after The Morning After, her hastily scribbled notes rolled up and knocking Tony on the shoulder when he shuffled his feet just a tad too slowly for her liking.

She cleared her throat after everyone had settled into their variations on slouching with frowns to match--if her eyes hovered over Steve and Bucky’s empty seats, no one bothered to acknowledge that they’d noticed. They knew better, especially since Natasha had muttered curtly not to bring it up as they had exited the elevator to the floor.

“I know it’s early--”

“It’s five-thirty,” Clint groaned into his arm. His head was buried in it and laying on the table. Natasha rolled her eyes and pulled him upright by the back of his shirt. “Aw.”

“I know it’s early,” Maria repeated slowly, “but there was an important development with the Chitauri yesterday and we need to make up for lost time.”

\---

They were splitting up. (“That’s fitting,” Tony muttered to Rhodey.) Jane had reason to believe that the Southwest region was going to be the likely target for whatever initial attack was being planned. Half the team would be headed to New Mexico to be stationed at Jane and Dr. Selvig’s lab, and the other half would be knocking on doors in the Pentagon.

“We barely made it through the Battle of New York,” Maria said. “We know there’s a threat, and it’s in everyone’s best interests if the DOD is aware of it as well, especially since SHIELD is--” She had paused long enough to make Natasha frown, but just barely. “Not a player anymore.”

They didn’t get to pick teams.

“You’re sending Bucky with us?” Rhodey yawned. “The Winter Soldier shaking hands with top brass?”

“If they’re still harboring shit about that years after the fact, it’s time they got over it,” she said. “And what better way.”

\---

Their planes took off less than two hours after they filed from the room. Out on the tarmac with the deep pinks and oranges just starting to lighten up and give way to blue, an ominous air hung around their ears, filled their lungs thickly like a humid foggy summer morning. Bucky and Steve were there this time, their bags slung over their shoulders and looking at anything but each other and those around them--the gulf that had opened up between them was spreading. There was a sense that the next time they would all be together would be life-or-death, shielding themselves from the spray of alien remains and bullets. So much was left unsaid. The risks of it were familiar. Almost palpable. They all knew that stoppage of the tongue in the throat, holding a word there until whomever it was meant for came back; how it sometimes got hard to breathe when they never did.

\--- 

Of course they were all going on planes lent from Tony’s fleet, so they were the nice kind that didn’t already feel too worn by crowds of the weary. There was room to move and two chairs to a small table at every other window.

Sam fell into the seat across from Bucky, made a small show of mirroring his pose--chin in hand, staring out the window onto the tarmac where a little ways away Steve and Tony were having some sort of tiff over loading the luggage. Bucky didn’t make any move to act like he’d noticed his presence, and the glazed sheen overtaking his eyes suggested he wasn’t really paying attention to anything. It was still early, and it had been a long couple days--couple weeks, years, _decades_ \--so he could have this moment to detach. Sam understood.

He still fished out two bags of M&Ms and tossed one at the elbow Bucky had propped up on the edge of the table.

“Thanks,” he said after a beat.

“What’s better than chocolate for breakfast?”

“Probably--um, cereal or orange juice. Anything really.”

“I didn’t say better _for you_ , man.”

And Bucky grinned, just enough and at the right angles that Sam knew the only thing keeping it from growing was the weight pulling down at the bags under his eyes.

They sat without speaking until take off, Rhodey and Clint already passed out in their own seats and Maria accompanying the Stark Industries pilot. Sam had a thousand questions but twice as much sense keeping his mouth shut about it--because it wasn’t the right time. It might never be the right time. And Sam, on some level, was afraid of hearing his dreads confirmed further. _This was what did it, wasn’t it? It wasn’t ever sustainable, was it?_

Natasha hadn’t been completely wrong the night he drove back from North Carolina: it wasn’t that he had known something, but that he _now_ knew. The theory was proven, the unintentional case study closed.

“You, uh…” Bucky started, sucking an orange candy into his mouth. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just thinking about someone.”

“Tell me about them.” And when Sam quirked an eyebrow--“Don’t look at me like that. I’m sick of everyone trying to get me to _talk about things_. It’s the same old shit since you guys brought me in. Go, it’s your turn.”

Beside them, Clint let out a choked snort of a snore and Rhodey barely stirred, only slumping further into the cushions. Maria had pushed them outside before the coffee could get made, and it would take a miracle to wake them up until the jolt of wheels back on the ground.

“I mean, you don’t have to.” Bucky popped a couple more M&Ms, tossing the last one up in the air and wincing as it came down on his nose and onto the floor. “But you never talk about yourself. I’m curious.”

“Like you were curious yesterday?” he asked, and Bucky shrugged. “It’s… it’s a story longer than this flight.” Riley’s name had almost gotten out, but he had refocused in on the deeper violet tinge lining the underside of Bucky’s eyes, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t put that on him, even though he’d asked.

Steve had asked once. And he had told him, sure, but he had ripped out a few pages of the story and shoved them in the shoebox Steve didn’t even know existed in the back of Sam’s closet. What could he say now, here, to Bucky after the mess of the past few weeks, that wouldn’t fall under the worst possible timing? Bucky wanted to hear about Sam because he was his friend, but also to distract himself, surely. He could only provide one of them.

Bucky poured out the rest of the M&Ms on the table and started sorting them by color. “What?” he said, looking up. “If the story’s longer than the flight, you better get started, right?" 

“You’re impossible.”

“I’ve been called much worse.” A small smirk flashed across his face as he turned back to his sorting.

“I don’t doubt that. It’s still a long story. Let me tell you about something else.”

In the end, he went back further, to a safer space that didn’t have Riley’s shadow stretching over the landscape and starving the trees. College, before the air force. The visiting Arabic professor that one semester who terrified even the brightest kids, who kept a small shrine to Mr. T in his office that no one was brave enough to ask about. The saga of getting lost in the network of steam tunnels under the campus with the guys from his hall, accidentally stumbling upon a secret society meeting, and running for what felt like their lives. Easy things, practiced stories. Sam knew how to make each dramatic flourish land, what details were superfluous and which moments needed a pause to let them really sink in.

And Bucky loved it. When Rhodey and Clint got jolted awake by Maria running to the back of the plane to pick up the satellite phone, he made Sam tell it all again.

Sam hoped--prayed, even, the first time in so many years--that he wouldn’t get asked again about it because he couldn’t talk about it. He could think about it, think about all the ways his mouth would form around the emotions and spit them out to be understood, but then he would try and everything would get locked up again. What he couldn’t say was that he and Riley were the first two chosen for the Falcon program and that they managed to live through every hiccup in getting the suits ready for the front lines, every kink that was hammered out. He couldn’t say that Riley was the first person to laugh, really truly laugh, at the terrible litany of corny jokes inspired by the hell of basic training, or that Riley sat up with him one night when a storm had woken them both and used toothbrushes to teach him how to eat with chopsticks. The nights before being shipped off to Afghanistan where they quizzed each other on their Dari and Pashto before it devolved into long spiels of “wouldn’t it be weird if…?”

And there was a night about ten days before Bakhmala when Sam had run to the supply room to get a couple paper towels for Riley to use as tissues since they’d run out and the nightmares had been bad that time, really bad--and Sam had stared into the eyes of the Brawny man while he tried to push the worry back down and thought, _You need to stop beating around the damn bush, Wilson, because you love him, don’t you?_

Riley had blown his nose and they’d sat on the floor at the foot of their bunk together until morning, Riley’s head on his shoulder and Sam’s hand a hair’s breadth from letting their fingers touch.

Ten days later, of course, he was dead.

And he wouldn’t be telling Bucky that. He wouldn’t be telling him any of it.

\--- 

_REPORT 001 - 04062017_  
_CAPT. S.G. ROGERS  
_ _PUENTE ANTIGUO, NM_

_Arrived at Albuquerque airport at 1200 and Foster/Selvig lab at 1630. No substantial meetings or finds relayed today. Thor, Foster, and Lewis insisted that we wait until the morning. Took everyone out to favorite restaurant/bar for dinner to, as Lewis said, “get used to seeing each other’s faces.”_

_Banner does not do as good of a job of keeping Stark in line as Potts does._

_First situation debriefing scheduled tomorrow for 0800 with tentative rain check for 1000 if Stark is still too incapacitated._

_INCIDENT REPORTS:  
_ _N/A (but barely)_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS:  
_ _Who am I addressing these to?_

* * *

 

In an objective sense, it had been a long time since Bucky had woken up in the middle of the night screaming and Steve’s body had been trained to be waiting for it. Years had passed and they could sleep through the night, squint against the morning sun fully-rested without the breath of those shadowy years blowing hot on the back of their necks--it was still there, that breath, but it was further away. By the time it was exhaled, it was just a cool puff tickling at their collars, an uncomfortable itching reminder that they could never quite scratch.

But two weeks before Halloween as the air started to sharpen its teeth for winter, Bucky sat up screaming into the pitch black of their bedroom at a time indeterminate from the smashed remains of their alarm clock on the bedside table. Hands clutched around his head and fingers angled like they were trying to dig into his skull--and Steve, a frenzied worried look overtaking him, one he was glad Bucky couldn’t pick out in the dark. He climbed around Bucky to face him, to hold his hands over his own, to try to talk him down from whatever was terrorizing him.

“It was you,” he choked out after a few minutes, sobs coming wet and heavy and hoarse. “I saw my hands punching you. I saw you falling into the water. I saw my gun shoot you and I couldn’t stop it? It was just-- _no no no no no_ , and I pulled the trigger anyway.” He buried his face in Steve’s shoulder, climbed into his lap, wrapped his arms and legs around him. “That--that happened, didn’t it? That was DC.”

Steve latched one hand around the back of Bucky’s head and pushed his face into his neck. There wasn’t anything right he could say. Nothing he could do to fix it but sit there, useless, until Bucky’s breathing returned to normal. But he still needed to say _something_ \--that was who he was, that was what they were to each other. Anchors. “That wasn’t you.”

By some miracle, Bucky was able to fall back asleep, curled into Steve’s chest like he used to when he first came back. Every breath he blew onto his collarbone brought a new sinking stone of dread to a pile that had been growing steadily over the years, and it grew heavier as he realized that this nightmare, the one he had been hoping so fervently would never come to pass, wouldn’t be one where escape would be as easy as waking up. Every day when Bucky would crack a grin a fraction bigger than the day before, he would say a silent thank you to whoever was listening that he had blocked out his memories with Hydra, that even if the terror and trauma was still there, that it was raw and unpolished and couldn’t give him sharp edges to make him bleed.

This wouldn’t be the last time something rotten bobs to the surface. Steve knew better than to hope for the best case scenario, that this would be a one-time occurrence. Bucky could use the one foray into the blacked-out parts of his head to come face to face with what had happened and do some healing--that’s what Tony’s psychiatrists had said, anyway. It was all too easy to bury and ignore when it stayed in abstract.

Confront it. Absolve yourself of it--take the one step forward, just to see it, and then start the long, storied journey backwards, one step after one step after one step until the whole thing is nothing but a small dot.

_That wasn’t you._

Steve didn’t know if he believed what they had said--or, if he was being honest, even understood most of it--but if it made Bucky’s suffering less useless, then he could surely stomach having to watch him fight the war.

And he slept through the night, and Steve thought they were safe for a little longer--surely these things started out slow, surely, like all things, they obeyed the laws of the universe and couldn’t rush forward with neck-cracking momentum right out of the gate. But then it was lunch, it was barely twelve hours later, and Bucky was chopping tomatoes and lettuce for the burgers Clint and Tony were probably already burning upstairs, and then the knife was frozen, hovering above the tomato. His hand shook, and each tremor pressed into the skin, tightened it until it gave way and spat out a glob of juice to dribble down the sides.

“Buck.”

When he maneuvered to his side of the kitchen (slowly, slowly), Steve could almost see the reflection of the knife, the red of the tomato in the sheen over his eyes.

“Bucky?”

He set the knife down, hand still trembling, and turned to Steve with eyes so wide they had hands outstretched to keep what they were seeing from spilling onto the floor. “I’m going to be okay.”

“What do you need from me?”

Bucky was looking straight at him--but also through him, into something Steve couldn’t put a finger on and couldn’t care to seeing him like this. Outside their door, Natasha and Sam walked by, chatting noisily, and even their footfalls muffled by the carpet resounded like cannon fire.

“Do you want--”

He wanted to ask if Bucky thought he should sit down, if he wanted to talk about it, if he should shoot Tony a text and bail on the cookout, but Bucky’s hands were crawling up the front of his shirt and he was tracing a line along his collar with his tongue, because he knew how to shut Steve up without saying a word or covering his mouth.

“I want you to fuck me.”

“Buck--”

“I want you to fuck me, and then we can talk or whatever after lunch but _I need you to fuck me_.”

Bucky pulled him down the hall and into their bedroom, falling backwards onto their bed. Steve tumbled after, Bucky’s hands still wrapping themselves in and under his shirt, and the voice in his head hissing at him ( _this can’t possibly be a good way to cope, don’t enable this_ ) faded out to nothing under the touch of that tongue, those hands, the teeth catching his earlobe at just the right angle. He leaned back, propped himself up on an elbow, and under him Bucky’s black-blown eyes crawled over his face. He tried not to notice how they shone a little too brightly for the room’s dim lighting, white gleams along the edges catching his gaze as his free hand cradled Bucky’s face.

“If we’re too late they’re going to come looking for us,” Bucky said, low and strained.

The words were barely out of his mouth before he caught Steve’s mouth with his own.

There was a way their bodies fit together that they hadn’t ever mentioned outright and that Steve couldn’t quite put words to. A natural cadence to the way they walked around each other in the common room, how they could slip out of their clothes like water while tangled in each other, without hardly undoing a knot. He liked to think that something bigger was at stake drawing them to each other and letting them cut through the fog when all was thought to be lost. And then together--skin on skin, Steve’s hands crawling under Bucky’s back as he arched up towards him, feeling each rib there--some deeper purpose was being filled, it had to be, because that was what all these forces wanted, wasn’t it? For them to stay close to each other?

(They had never been meant to fall, not like that, not like they had.)

Later as they made their way up to the top deck of the Tower, Bucky held the tray of carefully arranged vegetables with a death grip and stared straight ahead. And when they got to the door leading outside, he brought his hand to Steve’s elbow to stop him--

“They sent me into Bosnia,” he said haltingly. “I was the first one in Sarajevo. I watched people burn alive in their parliament building.”

He pushed through the door and handed the plate off to Bruce, who motioned to the smoking grill, saying something, _something_ , but Steve couldn’t hear him over the buzz collecting in his ear.

“Earth to Rogers.”

The lip of an open beer was shoved so close to his face that his eyes crossed, but the bright red of Natasha’s hair was still visible, unfocused, around the neck of it.

“Almost thought we were going to have to send a search party down for you two. Are you feeling all right?” she added, lower.

“I’m fine.”

“Mhm.” She sounded wholly unconvinced. “Take the drink. Maria brought it, apple something or other.”

He took it from her, and her eyes didn’t leave his face or their questioning near-squint the entire time. But she wouldn’t press him, not here. Maybe not later, either. A couple quirked eyebrows across the kitchen during breakfast or over a particularly dull debriefing. Nothing outright. And that was fine--hell, it was more than fine, because what would he even start with?

“So they’ve stopped letting Rhodey exclusively stock the bar with his weird craft beer?”

“Thankfully.” The squinting hadn’t stopped, and she opened her mouth to say something, but Bucky appearing on her other side forced her back to her more normal demeanor--smirk, a quip waiting just behind her teeth waiting for you to unknowingly pull together the perfect set-up. “How’s the food looking?”

“Maybe it was food once,” he said. His voice hardly had the flatness to it from before, but to Steve it felt forced--he wondered if anyone else could pick up on the distinction. “It looks more like charcoal at the moment.”

And so it did: the grill was emitting thick curls of smoke, forcing Tony and Clint to pause their bickering long enough to splutter a cough and keep throwing the blame in the other’s face. Bruce stood off to the side with a fire extinguisher, somewhere between uncomfortable and completely fed-up.

Bucky caught his gaze as Natasha rolled her eyes to offer some form of assistance--which was likely only going to be a few more eyerolls and a lone remark about how they should have listened to her an hour ago--and that flatness came back full force. Years ago, when he had first been defrosted and driven out to Fury’s godawful cabin in the middle of nowhere, Steve had pored over the thick dusty books shoved under the bed--a chapter on Bosnia had been tucked into one of them, one of the many he couldn’t get through. In so many ways, he realized, he had no concept of watching that sort of horror reel play on repeat behind his eyes and something in his gut started burning, an acrid bile feeling creeping up the back of his throat.

He slowly reached his arm around Bucky’s shoulder and pulled him close in a one-armed hug, kissing the top of his head.

“Not right now.”

So his arm dropped and Bucky walked away, back towards where Sam and Thor were watching the escalating grill scene and sharing a bowl of pretzels.

The futility of it all ran through his veins, turning his limbs into lead pumped by a slowing, stiffening heart drowning under the pressure--he needed to sit down, he needed to be alone and be able to shield Bucky from his own head all at the same time. He needed their old dingy apartment, or the room Bucky shared with his sister when they were young, or the hem of his mother’s skirt as she stood over the stove. Not on some rooftop balcony in the center of Manhattan in the twenty-first century. Then, it made sense when his mother succumbed to the tuberculosis--there was only so much that could be done. Bucky fell, but people died in the war every day. Inevitability and whatever idea of the natural order didn’t ever make the pain stop radiating from the center of him in the aftermath of it, but at least some parts stayed grounded. There were limits to everything. This was what happened, and this was how it was going to be.

Here, in this world, people came back from the dead and those who saved the world couldn’t save a barbeque. Familiar faces stared back with questioning gazes, struggled recollections just beyond their fingertips. And the smoke from the grill kept rising, rising, and Bruce still hadn’t pulled the trigger on the extinguisher, and Clint was still making a show of pointedly not looking at Tony’s continued ranting after turning off his hearing aides, and still the flaky, charred lumps burned further. Why didn’t they _do_ something? They were right there--it all didn’t have to collapse into ashes when they still had a chance to save an edible piece at the very center.

“I’m going to go get some damn pizzas,” he half-shouted, and finally the noise died. Not waiting to hear if they even wanted pizza, he pushed through the doors and was on the street before he even realized he had gotten to the elevator, much less the lobby. Blood pumping through his temples felt cold under his skin, the accidental bumps from passersby on the crowded sidewalk suddenly coated with undercurrents of veiled antagonism-- _what are you doing here, what is he doing here, the war should have swallowed you whole_.

The phone was ringing in his ear. He’d dialed a number, and it was ringing and--“St. Mary’s, how can I help you?”

_Oh._

“Hi, um...I was hoping to speak with Peggy Carter? It’s Steve,” he added after a beat.

“I’m so sorry, Captain Rogers...Ms. Carter has had a rough couple days and we don’t believe a phone call would be beneficial in her current state. Nothing to worry about, but it could be a little disorienting for her.”

He thanked the nurse and hung up. There wasn’t a pizza place in sight, and even though the street names on the corner rang with an easy but distant peal of familiarity, nothing looked quite like it had. He was tempted to go back empty handed, make someone else go for the take-out bandaid, but the temptation fizzled quickly. He could fix this. This was manageable. _He could fix this_.

* * *

 

_REPORT 002 - 04082017_  
_SGT. J.B. BARNES_  
_TO: CAPT. S.G. ROGERS  
_ _ARLINGTON, VA_

_Arrived at Pentagon at 0815, late due to traffic on I-395. Reached entrance to classified sectors and the guards refused to let us through. Hill argued with guards for ten minutes until Assistant Security Manager showed up. Stated SHIELD-issued clearances are no longer valid and that “being a damn Avenger” does not count as clearance. Wilson told Barton to not say anything else. Rhodes and Hill argued with ASM for another twenty minutes before we were escorted from the premises (Incident Report 001, attached)._

_Arrived at Starbucks at 0900 to restrategize for next day. Barton drank too much coffee to be productive, according to Hill, and his quiver and bow were making a group of mothers and their children nervous so we were asked to leave._

_Arrived at old SHIELD-maintained Dupont apartment at 1000._

_Worked on strategy until 1900. Barton insisted we go to Cuban place in Columbia Heights from Romanoff’s recommendation. Wilson kept Barton from drinking more coffee._

_Hill and Rhodes remarked to myself and Wilson privately that Barton cannot keep up caffeine intake and inquired if that was how it’s always been on missions. Issue tabled._

_INCIDENT REPORTS  
_ _001 - Pentagon, VA (attached)_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _N/A_

\--- 

“The reason I told Clint about the Cuban restaurant off 14th was _because_ of their coffee, to be fair,” Natasha said as she tossed the daily report on the table. “What a disaster.”

“What, and this isn’t?” Steve muttered.

She pursed her lips in begrudged agreement. Whatever was being cooked up in the lab down the hall sounded questionable, at least to their untrained ears. It simply could have been, as Tony had remarked sarcastically so many times, the Sound of Science. Explosions and shouting and zaps weren’t cause for alarm, but celebration: progress made its presence known with thundering steps and sometimes bits of yourself got stuck in the treads of its boot.

The noises were disquieting all the same, and without anything useful to contribute in the lab, they had been relegated to the break room. Natasha’s feet had been propped up on the wobbly card table for hours, and while she was fairly certain they were asleep, she didn’t want to risk the scene that would have surely arisen had she tried to walk on them without massaging them back to life. The excuse was useful enough in keeping Steve from dragging her down the hall to see if everyone still had their eyebrows.

“You talked to Sam?”

“Texted him a few hours ago.” He scrolled through the brief conversation and a small frown grew across his face. “Seemed a little off but I could be reading it wrong.”

“Did he say if they were able to get into the Pentagon this morning?”

“Well...seeing as it was almost noon their time and he still had access to his phone...I’d say they probably didn’t.” A pause--“What’s that look for?”

She was suddenly conscious of the downward pull of her muscles forming the frown that had Steve cocking his head to the side--and then overly, painfully conscious that she had already started running through her mental rolodex of contacts for anyone who could help them bypass security. An instinct she hadn’t quite learned to turn off when the situation didn’t call for it. If the entire team had to be called up for another hearing on Capitol Hill, she would rather it be for something more immediately life-or-death.

All the same, splitting the group up had led to the past couple mornings waking up and feeling like someone moved everything in the room to the left one inch only to find that all the furniture had actually been flat-out replaced. And she sensed that she wasn’t the only one.

“Did they say when they were finishing up with their science experiments?” she asked, and when Steve shrugged--“Let’s go for a hike.”

She got up and bounded out of the room without another word, willfully ignoring the numb tingling across her toes, and five seconds later she heard Steve’s heavy footfalls behind her jogging to catch up. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

“Okay.”

The thought to ask him about what had happened between him and Bucky after they had either ended their argument or taken it elsewhere crossed her mind, but she squashed the impulse. They had tried enough times to dig their hands into the mess to cobble together some solution--because that’s who they were, they were Avengers, they were heroes who saved the day again and again--but digging in so many times only let the walls collapse further. More than most, they should know that it’s never possible to punch or shoot their way out of a problem of the heart.

But they weren’t just Avengers--they were people, and they were their friends, and of course they wanted to help. They just were a little more than incapable of admitting they didn’t know how. “Impossible” was a word that Fury and Maria had tried to scrub from their vocabulary, and now Natasha guessed that it had worked a little too well.

Even realizing this, it didn’t stop the concern from tapping her on the shoulder when Steve still hadn’t asked any more questions about their eventual destination by the time that they had made it to Puente Antiguo’s main intersection. He was squinting against the glaring midday sun and bits of deep red dirt caught in the wind from the outskirts of town--and fairly nonplussed about it all. Steve, who had remarked countless times whenever she was sent on missions to the southwest how he had never been to the Grand Canyon or seen one of those big cacti up close, how Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert landscapes were some of his favorites in the art he’d discovered since coming back to life.

“Do you want to go climb up that thing?” he said suddenly, and she followed the line past the point of his outstretched arm and down to where the empty road petered out into dirt--and then further, through the air thick with wobbly heat, to a chunk of rust-colored mesa jutting up past the horizon.

“Seems a little dangerous.” Egg him on, gauge the reaction.

“The view would be good, though.”

The insistence--present but not pushy. A step in the right direction, at least.

“Do you even know how to climb?”

“Do _you_?” There was a small smile playing on the edge of his lips, and it tugged on the smirk growing on hers.

“I know a lot of things, Steve, and one of them is that you talk a lot of shit.”

He didn’t bother to dignify the dig with a response, and in twenty minutes they were standing in the shadow of the monolith, necks craning as they strained to pick out anything that would support their weight on the way to the top. The smile that Steve had merely been hinting at back in town was out in full force now. Maybe it had something to do with the recklessness of the proposition, the lack of safety net, the idea of picking a fight with something that would only continue to fight back if you fucked something up yourself. It was the kind of look, the kind of idea that was working on giving Bucky a hernia.

The rock wasn’t tall enough that he would get too seriously hurt if he fell; Natasha, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about herself, but it wasn’t something she was planning on doing.

Steve latched onto the rock and hoisted himself up, quickly scaling a couple feet with handholds Natasha hadn’t been able to spot from her vantage point.

“Just so you know, she said, “if you fall, I might have a hard time catching you.” He paused long enough to shoot a smirk back down the sheer face before vaulting up another yard. “You never were a great listener, were you?”

“Had a couple of bad ears as a kid, so: no.”

She knew he couldn’t see her roll her eyes, but she did so anyway--it was possible that he would be able to feel the reverberations from it rolling up to him, but mostly it cooled her worry to  manageable level. A string of petty frustrated thoughts raced through her head as she looked to follow his path, testing each nub of rock before applying any weight. The pull and strain on her muscles was slight but present and the beads of sweat collecting at her hairline slipped down her face the further up she climbed, as if they were afraid of heights and itching to crawl back into the safety of the dry cracked earth below.

Even with every imaginative jump and spring, zig-zagging up the face, Steve scaled faster. He was waiting for her when she threw her leg up over the edge.

“See?” he said. “It’s a nice view.”

She joined him where he was sitting with his legs dangling over the empty air. “It is.”

Puente Antiguo was truly an insignificant little place, its roads fanning out into dirt and dead ends or collecting, merging into the highway that dipped into the horizon on its long, long journey to Santa Fe. In the center of it all hung the comically-useless stoplight that told scores of invisible cars when it was time to move on. The entire town seemed to be covered in an omnipresent layer of dust, forgotten.

“Looking out at this almost makes me feel my age,” he said after a few minutes.

“Which one?”

He grinned, half-chuckled, never letting his gaze waver from the minute figures meandering down the sidewalks. “Both, to tell you the truth.”

She waited for him to explain what he meant but the words didn’t come, and she supposed they didn’t need to.

“It’s beautiful out here,” he said quietly.

“Thought you were more of a city boy.”

“I guess.” He leaned back, ground the palms of his hands into the dusty rock like he wanted to fuse himself to it. “The city gets so loud. There’s always so much going on and--I don’t know. It’s peaceful in the middle of nowhere.”

“Sure seems that way, doesn’t it?”

She watched him out of the corner of her eye--something else was itching to get said, something doing twists and turns around his mouth, knocking wildly against the back of his teeth as they spiraled in some attempt to scoop up the right phrasing that had scattered and exploded across his tongue. The pieces had been there for weeks and only when no one was looking could some sense be pulled from the mess.

“I told you about O’Keeffe, right?” he said after a few minutes. “How I went down to the Brooklyn Museum that day?” He waited for her to nod before continuing, “There was that one work. It had some hills, big cloudy sky, and--I think it was a ram skull or something, I don’t know, a big thing with horns. Dead, obviously. Because it was a skull. And there was a flower up next to it, like it would be tucked behind its ear if it still had an ear. It’s the only thing that’s alive in the whole painting--well, okay, there are some trees on the ground, but the flower was the most obvious thing. The whole time I was looking at it, I could only think about how a flower wouldn’t last in the sky. It’s not planted in anything. It’s not where it’s supposed to be, and it looks fine now but--but it’s going to die up there.”

Natasha fought the urge to turn and look at him, squinting against the sun that had started to glare harder against the desert and singe her exposed skin. Something out there was pushing the words out of Steve and she wanted to find it too. She wanted to understand.

“And the worst thing is,” Steve kept on. “The worst thing is… flowers die and there’s not even a skull left. Just some dried-up, brown husks waiting to get crushed into a million pieces and blown away, and it happens so quickly when you pick them out of the ground.” He leaned forward, hunched over his knees with his back in a perfect curve. Hands rubbed over his face before he realized where they’d been--when he glanced over at her and she met his eyes, the red dirt was smudged all down his cheeks and past his jawline. “You never expect the nature scenes to hit you so hard, you know? To really make you look at yourself.”

With her feet still hanging over the edge, she slid closer to him and rested her hand on his for a moment. _I understand_ \--she had meant to say it but something in her throat cracked before she could. She felt the waver in her voice in the scene where she did, where she managed it, caught somewhere between trembling with the weight of her own sudden surge of emotion and the laugh stuck among it all that was so determined to latch onto the dusty smears on his face.

 _You’re not going to die, Steve_ , the other-her was saying. _It’s a painting. That flower is going to live forever_.

Her own mouth stayed stubbornly shut, sealing itself, but she forced her arm up, gripping at the sleeve to wipe away the dirt.

“And Darcy wondered why you had packed long sleeves to go to New Mexico.” He grinned tightly and his cheek pushed up under her hand.

She grinned, trying to imply that of course, didn’t Darcy know that she was always prepared? _But only for certain things._

She had rubbed most of the dirt from Steve’s face, a few lone streaks remaining that could be washed off back at the lab, when she felt her throat opening back up, the swell pushing out--but her phone started buzzing in her back pocket.

Steve glanced down at the caller ID and grimaced. “I hope Tony isn’t calling to say they’ve blown something up.”

She pressed to answer on speakerphone and held the screen up between the two of them. “What did you do?” she sighed, and somehow her voice felt raw from disuse.

“Wh--Nothing! I did absolutely nothing. Not like you’re thinking. We _did_ make progress today--hey, Jane, please don’t look at me like that--anyway, Romanoff, where’d you and Cap get off to? We got Indian food. Early dinner, something about Selvig’s digestion problems, don’t ask.” He was talking many miles a minute and the rest of their group was chattering loudly in the background, quickly becoming an incoherent mesh of noise.

“There’s a place here that makes Indian food and there’s not even a Dominos?” Natasha said.

“Who said anything about take-out? Bruce made it himself. Picked it up when he lived over there. It’s fantastic, and if you two want some, you better--”

“Stop saying that,” Bruce called from the background. “It went all wrong, I messed everything up with the rice--”

“You better get over here before we eat it all. All this _great fantastic food,_ are you _listening,_ Banner--”

“If it’s better than your stuff, then it’s certainly edible,” Steve deadpanned, but his face didn’t reflect the snark he was throwing into the phone. He was still chewing on something, holding it close to his chest.

“Wow, Cap. I’ll remember you said that. Anyway. Get your asses back here. And, uh… some of us may have been worried,” he added hurriedly before shouting back something to Thor and Darcy and hanging up.

“So.” Natasha tried to get Steve to make eye contact but he was still staring past the phone in her hands, an invisible second set of arms clutched around his own chest like a security blanket. “You hungry?”

“I could eat.” And he cracked a smile, or tried--something in the way the corners twitched reminded her of the flower in the cloudy painted sky, waiting to wilt until the museum patrons left for the night.

\--- 

_REPORT 003 - 04092017_  
_CAPT. S.G. ROGERS_  
_TO: SGT. J.B. BARNES  
_ _PUENTE ANTIGUO, NM_

_Team save for Romanoff and myself in lab all day. Lab report with findings attached. Would summarize but could not manage to pin someone down to interpret. Some disagreement exists between Stark and Foster regarding page 4, diagram 3. Banner remarked privately that he was leaning to side with Foster._

_Meeting on lab findings planned for day after tomorrow at 0900._

_INCIDENT REPORTS  
_ _N/A_

_OTHER ATTACHMENTS  
_ _Lab Report 001 - Foster/Stark/Banner/Selvig_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _I wish we had gotten out here together earlier like we had talked about. I’m sorry._

* * *

 

Nightmares came in pairs.

It was a pattern he should have spotted a while ago, should have come to expect. It couldn’t ever be just one. Steve’s mother couldn’t die without him also losing his job, and SHIELD couldn’t fall without uncovering the long terrible history after the war and finding Bucky in the middle of it. So, if he were to keep the pattern and be hard on himself, he shouldn’t have been surprised when he came back to the Tower after a quick day mission to find four missed calls on his personal cell phone. A mere week and a half had passed since Bucky’s missing memories had started their nightly resurgence and it was long overdue.

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asked quietly when he found him still staring at the phone in the kitchen, voicemails still waiting to be listened to and holding their news like a landmine.

“They’re all from St. Mary’s.”

He felt Bucky come up behind him, wrap his right hand around his waist. As he glanced at the phone screen, his breath brushed up against Steve’s ear then stopped, choked almost, when he realized what it meant. “Peggy?”

“Who else do we know there?” He sighed. Put the phone face-down on the counter so he could grip at the edges to hold him up. “Let me call them. Maybe… maybe it’s nothing. Go back and lay down, you had a long night.”

He hadn’t been there himself to help, hadn’t even known about it until his missions-only Stark Phone buzzed with a quick FYI from Bruce. Bucky was fine, they had said. He just got back to sleep and everything was fine, no need to worry. Except of course he worried, of course, and the message was time-stamped at a little after four that morning, and Steve didn’t have to check to know that the circles under Bucky’s eyes had grown a shade darker in the time he’d been gone. Gone. Absent. Unable to help when he needed him to.

“I’ll be there in a minute, okay, Buck?”

“Are you sure?”

He turned around and cupped Bucky’s face in his hands before kissing him; as he pulled back, Bucky leaned forward to chase his retreating mouth, resting his forehead on Steve’s instead. “Yeah. It’s fine. It’s probably nothing.”

\---

The bed sank next to him twenty minutes later and Steve’s arms wrapped around Bucky tightly, loosening when he found him so tense already. His hands drifting until they could latch under Bucky’s arms, grip onto his torso--for dear life, it seemed, but lightly. The desperation there, so eager not to hide itself, clung to the edges of his fingernails, and all the while the pads of his fingers rubbed into his chest.

“How is she?”

Steve’s hands stopped moving, but only for a moment. “I’m going to drive down and see her tomorrow.” His lips brushed the back of Bucky’s neck. “Do you want to talk about… last night?”

He did, because he knew Steve was worried since he hadn’t been there, and letting Steve hold his hands, kissing them when the chill of dread edged past his own skin--he sometimes thought that did more than any of Tony’s doctors had managed so far. And yet he didn’t, because he could try to ignore it when it was just in his head. Saying it out loud only made it more real, taking the time to fit the right phrasing around the image rattling around behind his eyeballs. Only then, with the words draped over the abstract flashes like a sheet, could he see the real shape of it: the horns, the sharp tail, the nose and cheekbones he stared down in the mirror every morning. He’d rather shut his eyes. Rather let Steve hold his hands in silence, touch the tips of their noses together, feel the stillness and pretend that they were a few boroughs over a few decades earlier and that nothing terrible had yet rolled over their bones.

But Steve looked at him so imploringly when he turned to face him that he couldn’t say no. He imagined it must have always been difficult. It had to have been.

“I’m trying not to keep a tally of everyone I see myself kill.” Steve takes his hand in his, his left one, still icy from the heat that hadn’t kicked on yet. “I’m trying not to but--there was… in Mexico somewhere, maybe further south. I killed a man and blood leaked from his mouth, straight down his chin. I said I wasn’t going to keep a tally but the tally mark was right there. It was right there.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Is that supposed to change anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“I move on with my life, they’re still dead. I’m still the one that did it.”

“I’m going to say this until I’m blue in the face--”

“Don’t…”

“That wasn’t you.” Steve pulled him closer, let him nestle his face into the curve where neck met shoulder--for comfort, he thought, or something along those lines, but Bucky merely didn’t want to look him in the eye anymore or feel obligated to. “That wasn’t you. It wasn’t ever you.”

He calmed his breathing, sank into Steve, even as every fiber tying him together was screaming to do the opposite. He had to let Steve think he was helping, that the attempts at bailing him out of the sinking rowboat were working. Bucket after bucket tossed back in the lake, but there was a still a leak that hadn’t been plugged yet and he didn’t know where to look. He didn’t even know how to start.

\--- 

The water of the Potomac was a dull dark gray under the cloud cover beyond the outlines of the Watergate Hotel and Kennedy Center, and the dots of mustard-colored construction equipment in the distance--still dredging the river for wreckage from the helicarriers--almost seemed garish, out-of-place. Like the whole scene should have been edging toward grayscale.

The traffic from I-66 nearby should have been muted as well, but it only rang more obnoxiously in the ear that didn’t have a phone pressed up against it.

“Slow down, Rogers,” Morita was saying. “Slow down.”

So Steve slowed--to a stop, in the middle of a busy sidewalk, jostled against the other pedestrians with a destination in mind until he found a bench to fall onto.

“I didn’t say stop talking altogether. Just slower, my hearing’s starting to go.”

“It’s Peggy,” he said after a breath, making sure to enunciate clearly and fight the wobbling inching up his vocal cords. “I’m in DC. She had a… they called it a TIA, I don’t know what it means exactly. A mini-stroke, they said.”

“Jesus. Is she okay?”

“I couldn’t get in to see her.” But he pushed past that. It wasn’t what he wanted to dwell on--so he prattled on about everything the nurses had told him in the lobby, or what he could remember from their small speech about it all. Precursor to a larger stroke. Something about blood thinners, and how Peggy couldn’t take them because of other medicine she was already on. The possible exacerbating effect it would have on her dementia. And he tried to speak slowly, he did, but it was all coming in a wave by the end and Morita didn’t stop him.

“She’s where she needs to be, though,” Morita said once Steve had paused to catch his breath. “Right there with the doctors. Dugan’s brother had something like this happen to him about fifteen years ago. Had one of these things, didn’t know what it was til the big one hit. Thought it was just low blood sugar or something. It was too late by then. Shit,” he added. “That’s not really all that comforting is it?”

Steve forced out a lone chuckle and watched on the far shore as the small figures of men in neon-yellow jackets and hard hats climbed out of the equipment, hopping down off the tall treads without so much as a look back. The bucket on the excavator tucked against the ground beside a pile of grimy metal scraps that hadn’t yet been hauled to the landfill. A small pile, in the grand scheme of things, but still taller than the driver’s cabin of the machine.

“It’s fine,” Steve said. “Like you said, she’s with the doctors.”

“...you told Barnes yet?”

“What?”

“You just sound like I’m the first person you talked to since hearing all this.”

“Well… you are. You needed to know,” he added when he could feel the skeptical look on Morita’s face all the way from the west coast. “I wanted to break the news to Bucky after I’d had a chance to… uh... “

“Calm down? Process shit? He’s your--hell, boyfriend? I don’t know what you two call each other, probably something sappy, but that’s still a thing with relationships, right? Emotional support?”

A flock of pigeons that had gathered at his feet scattered in a flash as a young couple walked by with their corgi. It stopped to sniff near his shoe, and he wanted to pet it, rub the soft fuzz lining its ear, but then the couple would spot him. He would have to turn on the Captain America public relations front and deplete the last of his emergency energy reserves--and he still had to get back to his car. Still had to drive home. Plastering on a fake grin and smothering himself in a layer of palatable charm that always made good source material for feel-good clickbait articles online--the mere thought of it nearly guaranteed resigning himself to spend the night on that very bench.

“He’s had a rough couple days,” he said, watching the dog bound away on its short legs.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” Morita waited for him to say something and huffed directly into the receiver when he didn’t, throwing a load of electronic fuzz in his ear. “Okay then. Listen, though, Rogers,” he continued, but more softly. “Thanks for letting me know. And keep me updated, okay? You guys ever need anything--”

“I’ll call you. I know.”

They said their goodbyes and the wind started picking up off the river--the clouds pushed through the sky with it but the scene before Steve’s bench didn’t grow any less gray. His fingers didn’t pull themselves together enough to call Bucky with the news. After all, wouldn’t he see him tomorrow? Wouldn’t this be better delivered in person so they could face this together, so Bucky wouldn’t have to hold the news without a second set of hands who truly knew? Of course it would, of course.

It had been a long time since coming back to the world that Steve had felt this young.

\---

The hour was late by the time Steve made it up to the apartment in the Tower. His bag had fallen off his shoulder in the elevator, slid down until it was pulling down in the crook of his elbow; it wasn’t uncomfortably heavy, but it was at an odd angle that seemed to amplify all the wrong facets of the refracted light passing through the bedroom window, the empty vase on Bucky’s bedside table. Hovering in the doorway, he didn’t want to wake him. The clock ticking overhead, latched to the wall over the door frame, it was loud enough. Steve wondered how he could sleep with it like that--couldn’t they turn it down? But Bucky didn’t move, curled around what he then recognized was the pillow missing from his side of the bed, facing the wall.

“Are you going to stand there all night?” The light tone sounded strained.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No.”

He stepped out of his shoes and slid under the blanket Bucky had pulled over himself rather than disturb the clumsily-made bed. Without the weight of the bag there, his elbow felt light, raw with the lack of being dragged down but still feeling it all the same. The sensation snaked up his arm and into his shoulder, and he wrapped the arm around Bucky before it could reach his collarbones to try to choke him.

“What’s going on, Buck?”

“The usual.” He didn’t turn over, just spoke half into the pillow. “A little blurrier this time. But are you okay? How was--”

“I’m fine,” Steve said quickly. “What do you need?”

Bucky fell silent--exhaling deeply after a few moments, reaching up with a free hand to meet Steve’s own, entangling their fingers at the odd angle. “I don’t know.”

“How about a glass of water while you think, okay?”

“Okay.”

He padded down the hall, some sort of electric fuzz chilling the exposed skin of his arms and the edge of his face. Even in the kitchen that clock over the door was still ticking too loudly--it was what, nearing quarter to two in the morning by the clock on the oven, and still it couldn’t offer some respite? Not even a couple rooms away? And the plastic cups were still all in the sink. The icemaker was on the fritz again, it seemed. He’d forgotten to bring the Brita filter back down from the communal kitchen after Clint had borrowed it from the barbecue. Each straw fell on his shoulders and he felt his knees start to buckle. 

“Tap water is fine,” he said to himself. “It’s the Tower. There isn’t bad water here.” He filled two glass cups and set them on the island counter, leaned against the refrigerator to stare. The fuzz hadn’t gone away but rather seeped further into him: down into his shins, the crown of his head, around his hips.

“Get it together, Rogers,” he muttered. It hurt to blink--the burning scraped at the inside of his eyelids. “It’s going to be fine.”

One breath, two breaths--he grabbed the two glasses, took a swig from one as he made his way back to their room. Bucky was sitting up against the headboard, Steve’s pillow still clutched in his arms.

“Thanks.” He took the glass and downed the whole thing in a couple large gulps. “Come sit with me.”

“Still not tired?”

“Are you?”

“Got me there.” So he crawled in beside him, not bothering to pull up the blanket but taking special care to reach for a coaster on the bedside table for his half-empty cup. The fuzz on his skin tapered off the closer he sat to Bucky, and he felt himself get further grounded in his own bones, back to the way it should have been. But the edge of it was still there: not gone, just turned down to background noise. Bucky rested his head against his shoulder and the sensation splashed away, increasing around the border where they touched, only to come crawling back minutes later.

“So how can I help you with this one, Buck?” he murmured into his hair. “What do you need?”

“Just this.”

As Bucky’s breathing slowed, he let his mind wander, but not freely. He herded his thoughts away from DC and into their room with the door shut behind them. Let them meander around both sides of the bed, into the dresser drawers. This was what Bucky said he needed. This. Him there and Steve here, looped around each other. He could do that. He could help, he could provide that life raft when the seas grew choppy and black with the storm. And he could always tell Bucky about his trip to DC tomorrow.

* * *

 

_REPORT 007 - 04132017_  
_SRG. J.B. BARNES_  
_TO: CAPT. S.G. ROGERS  
_ _ARLINGTON, VA_

_0800 finally got through to secure CAA spaces in Pentagon and top personnel offices; evidently via Hill and Barton’s joint strategy of a sit-in at the guard’s desk. Meetings lasted all day, sign-in sheets unavailable. Meetings did not start on time due to arguments about my presence, which were shut down after two minutes._

_Generally wholly unproductive. Regrouped at Dupont apartment at 1900. Wilson hypothesized that lack of willingness to cooperate perhaps a product of deep sleeper Hydra agents whose positions weren’t recorded in SHIELD’s leaked files. Rhodes and Barton pointed out that Hydra has no ties to the Chitauri and would not feel obligated to protect them. Idea tabled._

_OTHER ATTACHMENTS  
_ _Meeting Minutes 04132017 - Unavailable (TS)_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _Don’t talk to me about the Grand Canyon. I know you’re not there, but don’t._

\---

_REPORT 010 - 04202017_  
_CAPT. S.G. ROGERS_  
_TO: SRG. J.B. BARNES  
_ _PUENTE ANTIGUO, NM_

_Reports late due to incident at lab (Incident Report 002, attached). Electricity just now restored to block._

_Meeting at 1030. Foster’s initial findings indicating Chitauri likely targeting southwestern United States supported by recent evidence. More work translating intercepted messages challenge motive, though Stark does not appear to be interested in that side of the issue, unlike the rest present. Meeting derailed by argument between Stark, Selvig, and Foster on “nature of science” and “pursuit of knowledge.” Minutes of said hour-long derailment not kept, deemed unimportant and seconded by Romanoff._

_Thor spoke to Romanoff and I privately afterwards to inquire that your team, quote, “prod a bit more valiantly” at the top brass as he has just returned from a two-day trip to Asgard, and Heimdall is “worried.” Would not disclose more._

_INCIDENT REPORTS  
_ _002 - Puente Antiguo, NM (attached)_

_OTHER ATTACHMENTS  
_ _Meeting Minutes - 04202017_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _What do you want me to talk about, then?_

\---

“If you look that sad when you get into the lab, they’re going to ask questions, you know,” Natasha said. Her tone may have been tiptoeing along the line of playful but the look she shot his way was anything but.

“What have they got us doing this time?” Steve’s fingers lumbered over each other, trying to subtly flip over the paper he had been gripping creases into. But they lumbered, they stumbled: it was noticeable and glaringly so, but Natasha didn’t spare it more than a glance.

“Taking down data. And... ” she said, stopping in front of him as he stood from the table. “Do you want someone to ask questions?”

“No… better not.” He shrugged, waved off her stare.

She watched him as he took the paper and folded it once, twice, and again, then stuck it in his wallet. It poked out beyond the edge of the billfold and the ends crinkled in on themselves when he pushed it back into his pocket.

\--- 

_Steve,_

_I don’t want you to talk about anything. It’s too late for that, probably. What I want to talk to you about--I want you to understand because sometimes, for all your talk of ethics and staying true to the right course, I don’t think you do. It’s not that you’re not doing the right thing, I think, but that you’re so focused on keeping your feet on the trail that you miss the tree branch that’s ready to nail you in the face._

_I want to talk to you about the last time I saw you as you want me to be and as you remember: in the Alps, emptiness beneath my back, and my hand out of focus in front of my face because I was staring at yours. And I think I blacked out for a while because when I woke up it was cold and I was on the ground. Couldn’t move. All white everywhere I could look, except for some tree branches. I would say I thought I was dead but I really wasn’t thinking anything and I don’t think I could have anyway._

_I don’t know why I’m telling you this now instead of when you asked that one time. Maybe I should have told you then, but you had made that lasagna for dinner and you couldn’t get that bit of melted cheese to break instead of stretching into that ridiculous string between your mouth and fork. It felt like home and I didn’t want to ruin it with the war. And the after-the-war._

_But I’m telling you now. I laid there for however long until they found me and dragged me away, and you know the story from there, everyone does, but it was only then that I realized that I hadn’t died. And the whiteness comes back sometimes. It was bad after you found me. The nights I would wake up, that’s what I would dream of. I hadn’t remembered anything past that yet. And you were there, which meant I wasn’t dead and that someone wasn’t hiking through the mountains for me. It stopped for a while, those particular nightmares, and then I started remembering and now they’re back and you’re not here. I still don’t know what I did or what fucking happened but dammit, Steve, I miss you like hell. I miss you even while I’m angry with you--because I am, okay, I’m angry. You found the end of the line and I’m still walking it. I still need you. It’s a selfish thing to say but I can’t deny it no matter how much I want to. I’m angry and I can say I hate you all I want when people start bugging me about it but I don’t think it’ll ever be completely true, not even a little._

_I don’t know why I’m sending this. One, because what am I supposed to accomplish stapling this scrap of paper to the back of the daily report, and two, because why the fuck can’t we have this conversation in person?_

\--- 

The meeting wasn’t supposed to start for another half hour, but Bucky still went to sit in the tiny, windowless conference room alone. The change was nice--the Pentagon was always bursting full of people, even in the classified areas, and grabbing lunch in one of the food courts was simply not an option. All the afternoon held in store was more meetings, more uptight officers in starched suits, and absolutely no space to think since none would get done if precedent was any indication.

Maria and Rhodey were expertly spearheading their efforts, but it was only doing so much. They would spent hours and hours compiling reports in carefully-labeled binders only to have the generals hardly spare them a second glance. _Here is the science, here are the facts_ \--but the Chitauri were all dead, couldn’t they see? How could they have survived the warhead Stark flew up into the wormhole? After all, they hadn’t seen them tested with their own eyes like General Shaughnessy over here, right? Aliens? No. It was all a coincidence and they should just go home.

But they wouldn’t, and Maria’s parting words were always diplomatic and always, _always_ had a “fuck you” hidden between each breath so by the time the door was closing behind them, a general could always be heard muttering to himself, “Wait, did you--?” The consequences never materialized because by the time they resumed their talks, he had convinced himself it was all in his head.

It only took one day of that for Bucky to realized why Steve was sent to New Mexico instead of here, but he still was having trouble pinning down the exact reason why _he_ had to be put in these bland, stuffy boxes to stare at the bland, stuffy art when the droning arguments got to be too much. The irony was clear: the Winter Soldier himself in one of the Pentagon’s more secure wings with a visitor’s badge pinned to his lapel. It had a fucking _clearance_ label on it.

Something in the back of his head was warning him that it was a terrible idea to leave him alone here, despite the badge. Should’ve gone with Maria, Clint, and Rhodey to scope out the availability of a Taco Bell. Should’ve followed Sam to the Best Buy outpost to get the replacement charger for his phone. Should’ve done anything but just sit in this room and risk letting whatever latent horrors could still exist deep in his brain firing synapses in the wrong order--risk his left fist clenching like it was someone else’s and his own voice in his head fading under the metallic grinding he’d come to accept as normal all those years ago.

He knew what Steve would say but he didn’t want to hear it from Steve or even from himself. He just wanted it to be unequivocally true: Bucky Barnes could never revert back to the Winter Soldier, and all the tension around his every movement was his imagination.

“Where’s your escort?”

But of course it couldn’t just be that.

General Bonilla stood at the door, crumpled Subway wrapper suffocating under his fist and goatee twisting down into a glower. With the presence he commanded, Bucky wondered why he hadn’t heard the door slam open--it would have been appropriate.

“Yellow badges.” He tapped his lapel. “We don’t need an escort.”

“Hmph, so be it,” he grumbled, sitting directly across the table from him. The Subway wrapper sat in front of him, balled up and bending beneath the pressure of his hands, which he kept tapping to an uneven rhythm. And he kept staring, right into Bucky’s eyes--Bucky wanted to look away, could feel the tight, anxious feelings crawling up his chest, but to look away from this, he felt, would decidedly be a defeat. “I guess we both subscribe to the adage that early is on time and on time is late,” he said lightly after a few minutes.

“I guess so, sir.”

“But answer me this--Barnes, is it?” Bonilla cocked his head and Bucky nodded, biting his tongue. It wasn’t like they had been in meetings together for the past two weeks or anything. He knew his name. This was a power play. “Okay Barnes, so how does someone like you get name-checked and cleared with a yellow badge for this level?” 

Bucky’s blood ran cold: ice freezing in his veins, making his heart stop long enough to lose three or four beats before starting up again. “Excuse me?”

“I knew men that died in El Salvador in ‘81. Good men. One of the survivors of that regiment said something about an agent made of metal ambushing them in the jungle.” He paused, and Bucky watched his eyes crawl over his face, his arm as he felt it the prickling discomfort of the glare wash over him. “So excuse me if I don’t find your presence here appropriate.”

Slowly Bonilla’s hand flattened itself over the wrapper and pressed down, down until it flattened completely and couldn’t spring back up to any semblance of its former shape when he brought his hands back to his chest. The man was looking for a fight, any reason to get him thrown out of the facility and smear the name of the Avengers and whatever Maria was holding together from the rubble of SHIELD--and he could give it to him, he could give it to him like he would never expect, with Steve’s wheezing asthmatic voice egging him on, murky and warped in his ear. 

“You got anything to say?” Bonilla goaded.

“No.”

“So you agree with me then? That you shouldn’t fucking be here.”

“I didn’t…” he said slowly. “I didn’t say that.” Bonilla kept glowering at him, and he continued with a clear effort to look anywhere but his face. “There’s nothing I can say to you about any of-- _that_. But things are different.” _Was that convincing enough?_ “I’ve been vetted. By Captain America himself.” He hoped the sarcastic lilt would ease the thickening ire in the room but it only served to solidify it completely, cementing him into his chair.

“That’s not what the tabloids are saying.”

The first knife went in between his bottom two ribs, pushing in slowly, the hilt rubbing up against the metal if his arm. He gripped there under the table, careful not to let Bonilla see that his words had hit their mark.

“My office had a bet going on when that charade was going to end and Captain America would realize he was aiding and abetting the _enemy_ \--”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Bucky muttered before he could stop himself, and under the sharp burn part of him surged with pleasure watching Bonilla’s face turn a very particular shade of purple.

“Do you know _why”_ \--his hand slammed back against the wrapper, flattening it completely--“the Avengers rely solely on Tony Stark’s pocketbook and engineering? Why none of their missions, even the most dangerous, have received military backup in years?” His voice was edging close to a whisper and straining to keep everything from bursting out at once. “It’s because of _you_. Pepper Potts pulled every string she could get her hands on to keep you out of Guantanamo and out of court, but that doesn’t mean we have to support the organization that harbors you.”

The second knife: dull, just above the first, the hilts crowding each other out, tearing at the edges of the wounds. He hardly felt it. He almost expected it.

“We couldn’t possibly lend aid to a group so powerful with so potent a leech inside,” Bonilla continued. “You could turn on us in the field. You could turn all of the Avengers against us. But they were convinced you were okay--Captain America especially, but at least he’s come around now. He understands. Isn’t that why?”

And the last knife, or he thought it was just one, a singular, it fractures before digging into his stomach and bypassing the ribs altogether. Bucky knew but didn’t remember learning that a stomach wound is one of the slowest, most painful ways to die. Minutes on minutes of acid and bleeding out.

“Isn’t that why he left you after all these years?”

There was pressure to answer, somehow, even though Bucky knew that Bonilla wanted him to stay meek and silent, confirm what he already believed to be true--or lash out, break his nose, confirm that other truth that Bucky had been fighting even longer than the one just spat in his face. And while he wanted to ball up the last bits of his composure, mold it into something solid and strong to insist that his and Steve’s relationship trouble wasn’t anything that the gossip rags could know about or that the intelligence community could speculate upon, there was nothing in him to gather. He reached and came up empty.

But the door opened again with more uniforms and polished buttons trailing in, followed closely by his half of the Avengers. The newcomers frowned among each other and even across the table before sitting in their designated seats.

“Arturo, did you take your blood pressure medication this morning?” General Lee murmured, and Bonilla held up a hand.

“Did we miss a memo about the afternoon session starting early, General Bonilla?” Maria asked. She cocked her head to the side and furrowed her brow, all while ensuring the rest of her demeanor remained as pleasant as if she had inquired about the weather.

The rest of the generals blinked a few times, but Clint became suddenly absorbed in his notes and Sam was trying to look anywhere but a person. They knew that look--the Pentagon, however, was unprepared.

“No ma’am,” Bonilla said.

“Good.” The word managed to ring despite the cloth-lined walls.

Bucky thought about trying to catch her eye but it would be a futile effort--Rhodey was lightly tapping on her elbow as she shuffled her notes and fought against pinching her mouth into a frown, and even he couldn’t get her to pause--to communicate a plan? To slow down? Whatever Maria was thinking appeared to be outside the plan they had formulated over Taco Bell, and there wasn’t any stopping it now.

“Now--” She flipped over the inch-thick stack of lab reports, emails, and color-coordinated notes and pushed them to the side, sending Rhodey’s notebook slamming into Clint’s elbow. “We’ve been at this for days, from morning until long after the sun has gone down, and still we are in the same place we were when we started. You may not believe or find credibility, even, in our intelligence about the Chitauri, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are coming and you are willing to risk letting the citizens of this country die over a vendetta or just plain stubbornness. I don’t know which it is and I don’t care to find out.

“Just know this: when aliens are once again raining from the sky and you can already hear the Senate hearings on why nothing was done echoing in your head, the Avengers are going to be saving your sorry asses because that’s what we do, whether you accept the threats as realities or not.” She stood, the chair legs catching on the carpet, and the rest of the room scrambled to their feet. “We’re done here. I’d thank you for your time but you’ve only wasted it.”

Maria and Bonilla stared each other down, carefully keeping their breathing even. Sam swept all the papers and notes on their side of the table into his arms, stumbling out the door as Rhodey pushed behind him with Clint in tow. Bucky made a move to follow when Maria placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Barnes, wait.”

Bucky could have almost sworn that Bonilla swallowed from the cold glare Maria shot him.

“And if I ever hear of you threatening or intimidating any of our team again,” she said slowly, forcefully enunciating every last syllable, “know that at the very least word will get back to Captain Rogers and you will find yourself regretting so many things, especially if you threaten _him_.” She reaffirmed her hold on his shoulder and gave a couple subtle squeezes with the tips of her fingers.

Bonilla opened his mouth, but she interrupted: “Even now.”

Maria didn’t allow another word--she steered Bucky out of the room and down the long windowless hall all without letting her hand drop. And it was either a lucky or smart move to keep it there because Bucky was still reeling from the past few minutes, and he could have easily walked straight into multiple packs of stern-looking suits or military uniforms otherwise.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked once they were about halfway to the stairwell.

“I...I’m not--”

“You are. Trust me.” She grinned at him, turning back to their path to skirt them out of the way of an aide sprinting past with her head in a legal pad. “I meant every word back there. Wasn’t just grandstanding. And I don’t make claims like that lightly.”

Her hand only left his shoulder once they pushed through the door to the stairs, where Rhodey, Clint, and Sam were waiting, sitting on the steps. They each raised one eyebrow in unison.

“Isn’t this a fire hazard?” Maria motioned to them offhandedly.

“What was that about?” Rhodey asked.

“Trying to keep the other people in the building safe in case of emergency?”

“Cut the crap, Maria, that wasn’t what we discussed in there.”

She pushed past them, stepping over Clint completely, and they tripped over each other trying to keep up. The level where they had been led (by the escort they needed and no longer had, Bucky realized with a cold jolt) was a couple stories underground, and Maria jumped up the stairs a couple at a time, ignoring every pointed remark they tossed up at her until they had made it to the unpopulated far end of the metro platform off the building’s main concourse.

“What did you honestly hope to accomplish sitting in a couple more weeks’ worth of that?” she said finally. A yellow-line train whistled to a stop in front of them and went on its way, Clint staring after it half forlornly as it left a few moments later. “That was a joke to them. We can be using our time here more wisely.”

Almost immediately the other three started talking at once, and the jumble overwhelmed Bucky’s ears. All he could decipher from it was a low-frequency babbling static: the garble of contesting words, the sliding pitches of the train brakes on the track, the two short bells alerting commuters to the pre-recorded safety announcement they all knew the words to.

_“‘Excuse me, is that your bag?’--”_

“If we’ve been blackballed by the Department of Defense, who are we supposed to turn to in this city--”

_“Such small words can mean so much--”_

“--the only reason we beat them last time was because of that bomb... from the military!”

He tried to shut it off: something was sticking a finger through the rabbit hole where his head had been regurgitating old chewed-up memories and now was not the time. It was not the time, and he couldn’t turn down the noise, stop the announcements or the arguments or the lady a few yards away chatting away on her phone in rapid Tagalog. Every word he understood, that their son had gotten a B on the history test and that the dog needed to be let out--and he tried to turn that down, too, but every syllable grew more grating in his head until he couldn’t distinguish it from the metallic screeching that seemed to fill the whole cavern of the station.

He shut his eyes, and when the next train stopped in front of them, a couple different hands guided him to a seat. They rode to Dupont Circle in silence, and when they trudged up to the apartment, the portable fax machine Rhodey had packed already had the other group’s daily report sticking out from the bottom.

Clint reached down to pick it up and offered it to Bucky cautiously. “You want to look at this later, or--”

“It’s fine.” He grabbed it, and a little more roughly than he meant to, and retreated to one of the back rooms.

It was still too loud. The Tagalog rang in his ear, laced with the smoke and shots over pockets of Mindanao, and in the stillness of the building something still vibrated violently, and he knew it was inside him.

\--- 

_REPORT 012 - 04222017_  
_CPT S.G. ROGERS_  
_TO: SRG J.B. BARNES  
_ _PUENTE ANTIGUO, NM_

_Latest data about location of Chitauri transmission origins inconsistent with previous findings. Selvig is checking instruments to check for calibration issues. Foster and Stark debated as if new information wasn’t a fluke. Banner rechecked formulas that were used and was sure something had been miscalculated._

_In short, if Foster and Stark are acting on a correct impulse, transmissions are no longer coming from outside the solar system. More information to come in next couple of days as long as Lewis and Thor manage to repair the coffee machine._

_OTHER ATTACHMENTS  
_ _Lab Report - Foster, Stark, Banner, Selvig_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _There’s a lot I’m sorry for and a lot that I’m not. I’m still not sorry that I jumped from that building in Ecuador, and I’m not sorry that I crashed the plane in the Arctic during the war, because that meant I could find you again. But I am sorry that I never looked for you and that I assumed you were lost forever. I could have saved you so much trouble. I think about that every time you get that distant look in your eyes, and I’m almost consumed with it when you’re drowning in yourself._

_I wish I could add to this list what you want me to, but I don’t know how to without making it worse._

* * *

 

The dishes had been piling up in the sink for days, and by Thursday morning they had run out of spoons altogether--they were somewhere in the teetering piles of plates and pans left to soak, beneath suds long dissolved into rainbow film, grimy and unusable. A lone fork sat in the silverware drawer with a collection of butter knives that never got used, and the prospect of eating his morning yogurt with a fork wasn’t some impossible, terrible thing, but it left Bucky’s stomach feeling dragged down into the grout under his toes.

He was weighing the cup of blueberry yogurt in one hand with the fork in the other when he heard Steve’s feet fall thickly onto the tiles and then pause.

“Oh--oh no, we out of spoons, Buck?” One eye was still plastered shut, and he ran his hands through a particularly spiky clump of bed head. “I’m sorry, I meant to get the dishes last night. I know they’re mostly mine from that thing with Sam and Nat earlier this week.”

“It’s fine, really.” Bucky peeled open the yogurt and brought a forkful to his mouth. “See? Totally doable. No harm done.”

But Steve still sighed, still eyed the mountain of cups and bowls with dried food stuck to them like cement, and the guilt twitched across his face so quickly Bucky almost didn’t catch it.

“Do you want me to get some of them?” Bucky asked. “I know you’ve got that briefing upstairs with Maria and Tony this morning, but I got time--”

“It’s my mess. I’ll get it.”

Steve nodded, almost to himself, and turned on his heel back to their room to comb his hair into submission and pull on real clothes--and, Bucky knew, to do whatever he did in the bathroom these past several mornings after getting back from DC to will himself out the half-asleep stupor that had come to define his routine in a short span of time. He’d stopped asking what had happened the second time Steve decided to step around actually answering him, and while he was worried, he also considered that maybe nothing had happened after all. Surely their lives felt like one tragedy after the other, but that didn’t mean that every development had to take the turn furthest south. Perhaps nothing had happened, and Steve merely didn’t want to talk about nothing.

(Then again, it was after he returned from DC that the growth of ceramics and glass had bloomed in the sink, sowing Bucky’s worry right into the stainless steel encasing it, despite himself.)

As he headed out the door half an hour later, Steve bent down to kiss the top of Bucky’s head and throw him a small smile. “I love you, you know that, right?”

“Yes, Steve,” Bucky half-laughed. “I love you too. And you’re stealing my lines.”

Bucky made sure to keep the corners of his mouth pulled up as long as Steve was still in their apartment, if only to convince him that the grin he was mirroring wasn’t fading into something heavy. But the door shut, and with the click of the latch he felt his face fall just like he knew Steve’s was on the other side--until he would pass someone in the hall or even hear someone coming. He had seen it for himself just the night before, and the night before that, going back to that same moment when Steve walked over the threshold into their home and looked anything but. Steve’s back would straighten on the couch when Bucky walked in, the grin he threw on suddenly while pushing at the sizzling ground beef was too bright in return for the favor of passing the cumin from the pantry.

He was home but acting a part, and Bucky could feel the tension in his muscles as they hung over each other, digging through the freezer for the pint of Cherry Garcia that had fallen behind the frozen peas. He could feel the tension snake through Steve’s arms when Steve had insisted they dance--not anything new like Sam and Clint had tried to teach them, but a slow step to crackling records that Bucky wanted to say was a reprise of before the war. Steve’s hands were light on his back and shoulder but his arms were as rigid as boards, his knees locked at odd beats and nearly sent his feet crushing down on Bucky’s toes, but it was the tension that gripped at him back behind his eyes that kept twisting something in his chest.

That night Bucky held him down gently, his own knees rubbing into Steve’s hips as he held his head like glass and kissed him until he had convinced himself that they had finally meshed together, that they could understand what couldn’t be said without having to say it. Because Bucky knew there was something--and he still knew it, watching Steve leave for that briefing--and he was determined to decipher the little sounds he pulled out of him to find out what it was.

But if determination was everything, they would have lived very different lives. They fell asleep with limbs and thoughts tangled, messy, and now Bucky found himself scrubbing at a chunk of dried spaghetti despite Steve’s earlier insistence. It was something to do while he fought back the newest batch of jagged bloody memories and collected himself to carry out the idea coagulating in his head.

\--- 

When Steve shuffled through the door, the sun was already starting to set and then oven emitted its alert that there was one minute left on the timer. Something Italian making good use of Rhodey’s eggplants, but he only had eyes for the empty sink beyond the evidence of the dinner preparation.

“Buck, I thought I told you I would get the dishes.”

“I didn’t have anything else going on today,” he shrugged. He threw the pot holders he’d been carrying under one arm up on the counter, tried to make the smile seem simple. “Usual sparring partners are out of town… no briefings… it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” Light, light, stay light: Steve was starting to squint and a shrill scream was tucking itself right behind Bucky’s eardrum, and he knew it wasn’t real, not in the present, but the thought pushed around his head so loudly that it managed to trick him into pulling the phantom of it out of thin air and Steve was still looking at him, still looking with that slow boil--

“I told you I would do them. You didn’t need to do that.” Each word slow and punctuated. “I didn’t--there’s a reason I said I would do them! I know the kind of weeks you’ve been having and all the weird things that set episodes off and whatever’s in that sink--”

“I’m not fragile, Steve,” he said quietly, turning away to tend to the steamed vegetables with more force than he probably should have been using.

He heard Steve sigh and plod over to the chair on the other side of the island. His gear clunked to the ground, then both boots. “Buck. Bucky. Look at me, please?” And he did, meeting a pained and reluctant face that Sam and Natasha had both likened to a puppy but that Bucky, in that moment, found supremely irritating. “Bucky, I didn’t say you were fragile. That’s not what I meant. And--I mean, it would be more than understandable if you were, given… well, everything--”

“I’m not fragile.” He turned back to the vegetables--green beans, they had been in season, Rhodey said, and they were a bright, fervent sort of green that further dulled the olive hue of their counterparts that came out of a can. The steam painted his face and collected along his left arm. He let it wick the frustration from him, let it bead like sweat. He didn’t want to talk about the dishes or the time last week when Bruce’s incense made him dissociate during the last half of the Scrabble game.

They had almost argued about the dishes, and that wasn’t the argument he had wanted to have if they were forced down that road at all. And he had it all planned out as to hopefully avoid that road altogether: dinner, a pie in the freezer, and he would broach the subject carefully-- _I hadn’t spoken with Peggy lately, thought I would give her a call_. Something like that, taking tentative steps from there. But they had circled around Bucky’s plan again, swerved into the dangerous roundabout of Steve’s neverending worry for him. And in the darkest moments when he felt as if he couldn’t see an inch beyond the end of his nose through the fog in mind’s eye, that worry kept him grounded. The hands wrapped tight around his, the forehead pressed against his temple, the patience, and Bucky was ready to fling it back at him. His stomach churned.

“I’m not fragile,” he repeated, turning off the stove and taking the beans off the burner. “But it seems like you’re always acting like I am.” Deep breath. _Just get the words out--_ “Is that why you didn’t tell me about what happened with Peggy? They called the landline yesterday while you were out and I picked up.”

The oven chirped loudly but he didn’t make a move to turn off the timer.

“Buck…”

“She wasn’t _my_ best girl but she’s still my friend. How long were you going to keep this from me?”

“Bucky--”

“I can handle myself, okay? Please don’t make these decisions for me--”

“I--I wasn’t trying to,” Steve said quickly. “I wanted to tell you when… when she’d had some more tests done and I had more information on how she was recovering, okay?” He was breathless by the end, cheeks flushed and halfway to saying something else had his tongue not decided to trip over itself.

 _Still a bad liar._ Because he remembered that. He could say that he remembered that. He still knew those tells like the back of his hand.

“Fine.” The timer beeped again and he smashed the button haphazardly to shut it and the oven itself off. “I’m actually not that hungry. Gonna go see what Pepper’s up to.”

In the past few weeks, he and Pepper had been sneaking into her office in the afternoons to marathon episodes of “Friends” when the Tower’s other common areas had grown too noisy or argumentative--and Steve was aware of these not-so-covert ops, so of course it was the perfect cover for getting out of the room before his composure really went to shit, and he couldn’t have that. Bucky Barnes was supposed to be the level head to Steve Rogers’ impulsive spitfire, and he couldn’t be him when tears pricked at his eyes as the emotions all hit him at once, crashing into his chest. It was so much like drowning, and the rising seas had to go somewhere.

\---

Anger and hurt lay on both sides of the aisle, but the consequences of these sorts of incidents had never lasted long. Steve knew of a couple different bets the rest of them had surrounding the arguments he and Bucky had--how short of a time would they stay angry and how the hell was it so short?--but he never caught wind of the details, the little scraps of paper he pretended not to see at breakfast the mornings after as they got passed under the table to Tony and Rhodey.

This wasn’t an argument that he wanted getting back to them. Most of the time, their tiffs were borderline absurd in how superficial they were at their core, but in the moment, spoiling the end of _Sixth Sense_ or eating the last of the Oreos grew tall and daunting and brought out the petty things they hadn’t even mentioned when they lived together before the war. Seventy years was a long time, and sands shifted under their feet. They had slept and bled and their steps were wobbly. Of course they could fight over something simple.

But this cut a little too deep. The others couldn’t even know this fight had happened.

So it was eight in the morning, Bucky was starting his yoga on the balcony off the Tower’s top floor, and Steve stood a ways behind him with a small pot with a sprig of vibrant coral impatiens. The sun had already risen hours ago and the early morning light caught on the grooves of Bucky’s left arm, shone around every other limb and clump of untamed bedhead--the stretching muscles wavered in the thin shadows. Steve loved him, he loved him and he had hurt him. And he didn’t know why he could never find it in himself to just tell him what had happened in DC.

His grip around the flowerpot grew tighter, but he stopped himself before he could feel the ceramic begin to crack.

“I don’t mean to interrupt…” he said, and when Bucky turned his head and quirked an eyebrow he added, “Well, maybe I do.” He held out the flowerpot. “Lucky number seven.”

“Lucky, huh?” He pulled his body back into its proper standing position, rolling his neck with a few sickening pops, but he didn’t take the offering before him. “Steve--”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you. I was worried--about you and about her--and I wasn’t making good decisions.” Slowly he extended his arms further and nodded towards the flower. “This should be something we do together.”

Bucky stared at him for a moment before sitting back down on the yoga mat and patting the space beside him. Steve joined him, flowerpot still in hand, staring back even though Bucky had redirected his eyes back out towards the city. From below, a wispy echo of car brakes and horns drifted up the side of the Tower, commuters and tourists and everyone in between caught in the morning rush--but it was peaceful on the balcony, despite it all. Relatively at least.

“Is this how you felt all the time back when… you know,” Bucky said. “Before. Did I get like this? I can’t remember.”

“Only sometimes. A couple bad winters. One flu season, I think.” Steve set the flower in front of them, between their bent knees. “You were quieter about it. I guess I haven’t learned how to do this from the other side.” And that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The gaps between his words whistled with the emptiness. “I’m sorry. I’m trying--I just… I want to be good to you. And to her.” That was the whole truth.

“I know, Steve. And you are.” He picked up the impatiens, twisting the pot in his hands to get all the angles of the sun on the petals, bringing it close to his face to inhale. Impatiens didn’t have that distinct of an aroma, but he stuck his nose in the center of them anyway, waited, and grinned to himself when he didn’t start to sneeze. Something in Steve’s chest was fit to burst. “I don’t know how you could be anything but,” Bucky added with a murmur.

That something in Steve did finally burst, and whatever it flooded through his system burned, the familiar waves of the love and affection with some deeper underlying current. Guilt. It felt too close, too cemented on the bottoms of his veins to be anything else, that slow seething ache that he had stopped being able to squash out completely since Erksine tapped at his chest from the lab floor.

 _He loved him, he loved him, he loved him_ \--the chorus pulsed under his skin as he leaned his head against Bucky’s shoulder. He loved him, and then in the breath between each declaration he could hear it-- _you love him (you hate yourself) you love him_ \--and he pushed his face further into Bucky’s arm until pinpricks of colored lights lit up behind his eyelids from the pressure.

* * *

 

“I think I’ve got it this time.”

“Well, if you don’t, then we’re going to have two Hulks on our hands and I just don’t think this bit of Middle of Nowhere is _quite_ ready for that.”

“Stark, Puente Antiguo fared marvelously against the threat of the Destroyer those years ago, and I do not see why it would not valiantly--”

“We are never going to get anything done if you three do not stop this garbage--I just,” Jane cut herself off abruptly, squeezed her eyes shut. Refocused on the group of lab coats before her with an oddly-scary, cheery smile that sent Tony’s own down a couple notches. “Bruce. Please. Try it again with the new calibrations. I am _glad_ you got the new ones worked out. In the meantime, I am going to go remind Erik to take his medication.” The grin never faded even as it looked to be straining her cheeks. The door didn’t slam shut behind her, but it certainly clicked with more force than usual.

“Yikes,” Darcy muttered over her soda bottle.

“You know, the peanut gallery over there could actually lend us a hand with this stuff,” Tony threw over his shoulder.

“The peanut gallery will lend a hand once the Academia Nuts figure out what they’re supposed to be doing.” She tossed a look over at Steve and Natasha, who were half slumped over the table the three of them had taken over, chins in hand. “Which--from where we’re sitting--doesn’t look like it.”

“I mean… she’s kind of right,” Bruce grimaced, and he quickly returned to fiddling with the various dials on the instrument from Tony’s look of betrayal.

It had been a long couple of days.

After it had been determined--for certain, this time, or as close to it--that the source of the Chitauri transmissions was located within the borders of the solar system, a command decision had been made to keep all members of their group together at all times, which cut down severely on the time Steve and Natasha could spend doing literally anything other than sitting around and watching a bunch of adults squabble like children in what might as well have been complete gibberish. Occasionally Jane would call upon them with Darcy to file some data or fetch some dusty peer-reviewed papers from the makeshift library, but those bright shining moments of something to do had dwindled as the hurdles continued to burst forth from the ground, trip them, and break their legs to halt any further progress.

“Any word from the DC crew?” Steve asked.

“Not unless you count this,” Natasha shrugged. A text from Clint was open on her phone: a ridiculous selfie he had taken with Sam by one of the dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum. Rhodey, Maria, and Bucky stood unfocused in the background, but their expressions of vague embarrassment were clear all the same. “And we really shouldn’t count this.”

“They’re letting anybody be Earth’s Mightiest Heroes these days, huh?” Darcy said.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Tony said, waving behind him.

“But no,” Natasha said. “Still no word.”

“Little late on those daily reports this week, aren’t they?” Tony said.

“Not if there’s nothing to report, I guess,” sighed Natasha. “And what’s it to you, anyway? You never read them.”

Tony held up his hands in an insincere surrender without turning around, a pen in one hand and a greasy work rag in the other. The three of them at the table exchanged rolled eyes as Tony and Bruce continued tinkering in silence while Thor looked on curiously. The floor above them creaked under Jane and Selvig’s footfalls, and Steve traced the groaning floorboards as the sounds snaked down to the far end of the house and back again, Selvig’s heavier, clumsier steps leading the way at various speeds. Before they all had arrived, Jane and Thor had been sure to brief them on the particular troubles Selvig had faced following the Battle of New York, but rest assured, they had said, he was doing much, much better. No relapses in over a year! But Steve had to wonder if the sounds they were currently trying to ignore were impassioned discussions of science or the long-coming slip. It wasn’t a hopeful view of things, but he almost couldn’t help himself at this point.

Half an hour later, Jane bounded back down the steps and sidled up next to Bruce to squint at the readings that he had been taking notes on.

“Good news, I hope?” Thor asked, but Jane merely frowned and made a noncommittal sound.

“At least let us go restock the fridge,” Darcy said. “This is getting ridiculous Jane-Zane.”

“It’s for your own safety.”

“We only have rice cakes. _Rice cakes_.” Her eyes grew wider than Steve thought possible and she looked to them for support. He nodded, and Natasha gave a half-shrug. “How are we supposed to feed superheroes and gods on rice cakes?”

Jane groaned, very pointedly refocusing on the readouts from the instruments, but the one glance she spared Thor and his oh-so-innocent grin pulled her back from Bruce’s side. “Fine. _Fine_. One person is running up to the Quik-E Mart and it’s not going to be you.”

So it was Steve instead--Darcy walked him to the door of the building, feigning the desperation of someone left behind as the lone prisoner made their escape. The reasoning made enough sense: sending out someone who could fend for themselves should something attack, leaving behind others to ensure the safety of the rest of the group who weren’t as well-practiced in fighting off aliens. Monsters. Men armed with guns and twisted ideas.

“Bring me back a slushee!” Darcy called from the door. 

The storm door slammed behind her with a springy wooden rattle, leaving the rest of the town in a stifling, burning silence. High noon, and not one soul in the sparse permanent population had decided to dare expose themselves to the unforgiving cloudless sky bearing down, baking the earth and asphalt to a point far beyond dry. Whatever they needed could wait until the shadows grew a little longer--everything except this particular run to the Quik-E Mart.

The sign for the convenience store peeked over the single-story brick skyline of the rest of the shops along Main Street, a bulbous plastic thing in faded neons, tinted brown from the near-constant dirt blowing in from the surrounding desert. It was inescapable. No one bothered to wash their cars and anything inside left close to a door had to be routinely wiped down. Left to its own devices, the town would get swallowed whole if there wasn’t anyone around to brush things off on a regular basis. 

And Steve enjoyed it, relished it even. But he kept those thoughts to himself--he didn’t need Natasha staring at him a little longer than normal over coffee in the morning, and he sure as hell didn’t need Tony careening down some tirade that could have been helpful had it been delivered by any other person. He already had his own suspicions about why he loved the New Mexico sun so much, a theory swirling around the war and deep chasms of rock and snow, constricting chunks of ice and frozen flecks of blood. Be he didn’t dwell. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t but he did.

In the Quik-E Mart, the air conditioning was cranked to the highest setting and the roar sounded like an engine, the rattling effort of the air, screws popping loose into the snow. But only for a moment. It didn’t last. The tinkling bell rushed his feet back to the smudged brown tile and the clerk who barely bothered to look up from her phone.

He looked at his list:

__ Red bull  
_Ramen_  
_doughnuts!! any kind pls_  
_HUMMUS_  
_peanuts??_  
_AND THE PRETZEL CHIPS FOR DIPPING_  
_what are the liquor laws here, can you get me vodka  
_ _Bananas, if they’re not gross_

And he promptly left the store, heat searing back onto his skin. There was a bench outside the post office, and not even in the shade, but he fell into it anyway and stuffed the list back in his pocket.

Two days before he and Bucky had left for Eritrea and three days before it all ended, Steve had brought up the summer of 1936--once in the morning, twice in the afternoon, and somehow close to five times in the evening as the clock hurtled forth into the wee hours of the morning, and he was thinking of it again. July. A few weeks after his birthday. It had been hot like this but humid with the thickness pulling off the Hudson and the stench of untended garbage cans, and stepping outside felt like stepping into a steam room. The pavement cooked the soles of their feet. In the worst of it, Steve even walked home with blisters stinging his heels, and Bucky had to have snuck some money into the coffee can he had used as a piggy bank because the next day he could afford a new pair--not _new_ -new, but new to him. The soles were thicker and the burns could heal.

But July of 1936. Bucky didn’t remember 1936, not those pieces.

Tempers on the street flared with the same wavelength that the air shimmered over the concrete, amplifying each other, glaring off the shop windows, and three days in a row the week following Steve’s eighteenth birthday, he came home with a new spot for the blood to flow and drip off his chin. New spots of raw skin ready to turn pink and puckered as the scabs formed in the night. “Someone made a pass at that Louise McAdams girl,” he shrugged the first night, “and they wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s got that leg problem, you know, couldn’t do much against those big guys herself _._ ”And Bucky frowned, silently fetched the bandages from under the kitchen sink and got to patching him up no matter how many times Steve swatted away his hands.

The second night another group was harassing a homeless man, Steve said, and he walked into the apartment with the old wounds bleeding over the coagulated flecks along the edges and an olive and eggplant cloud pushing his right eye into a squint. The third night he didn’t tell Bucky what had prompted it, just let him grumble and mutter and stretch the last of their bandages over the road rash on his knees and palms.

“Why won’t you tell me what the fuck happened this time,” he said, tossing the last scrap of bandage onto the table.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“If you got your ass handed to you by those punks who hang by the Irish pub around the corner, well… we could just not go that way to the market.” 

“We don’t have to be cowards, Buck.” 

He held up his hands in defeat, went back to wash them off. Threw the drying rag over his shoulder and turned to face him, leaning against the old counter and chewing the inside of his lip since his teeth couldn’t get to his thoughts. “Was it personal this time or something?”--

A pickup truck rumbled past Steve’s bench, kicking up a cloud of dust. He still had about half an hour before the rest of the crew would start trying to track him down, either out of concern or hunger, whichever shouted the loudest.

The dust settled and swirled in the pitiful attempt at a breeze, and with it Steve pulled back from the desert and back into the stairwell leading up to the old stuffy apartment he was sharing with Bucky that summer, and it was July 9th by that point with Steve’s exposed skin painted in an injurious rainbow, the sun setting with hues to match and Bucky’s feet fell hard on the steps behind him. This was the night Steve kept coming back to before Eritrea. (“ _Do you remember how you pulled me back from the door by my shoulder and looked at me like you couldn’t believe you were following such an idiot?” “No.” “Do you remember how you tried not to laugh at the bead of sweat hanging from the tip of my nose?” “No.”_ )

The streetlights were flickering on by the time they got to the alley a couple blocks down from their building, one Steve had a record in, a losing one, and he thought he could spot an old brown splat of blood from a few months prior, but it could have just been the rain. Bucky was fidgeting, tapping his thumb against his thigh in an erratic rhythm.

“I don’t know what they said yesterday but I hope this is worth it.”

“You don’t have to be here.”

“Shut up, Steve,” he sighed. “And neither do you, by the way.”

The fight was brutal. Outnumbered three to one by guys who must have had their schedules full to the brim with beatdowns in grimy city puddles in the shadows of tenements, whose brass knuckles lay under their skin. But they didn’t lose. They didn’t win, either, but they didn’t lose. ( _“Do you remember how that one guy ducked my left hook but he got off-balance and fell into the ass who kept trying to punch you in the temple?” “No.” “Do you remember how you kicked their ringleader without even looking and sent half of them tumbling into each other like dominoes?” “Stevie, why are you asking me this? I don’t remember any of it.”_ )

When they finally skulked away limping, Steve and Bucky were left sitting against the very back wall of the alley, Steve wheezing just hard enough for Bucky to flex his fist worriedly, white knuckles pushing up against his skin there. “See, Steve,” he said, “ _that’s_ having them on the ropes. Not whatever you’ve been trying to tell me.”

“Hell you talking about? We didn’t…” He took a couple deep, rattling breaths, coughed a couple times. Cleared his throat. “We didn’t have them on the ropes. They climbed right back through the ropes and out the door. That’s a forfeit.”

And Bucky grinned at him, teeth stained red and little rivulets trickling down the gaps from his gums. “I suppose it is.” ( _“Do you remember how we cleaned each other up standing over the kitchen sink? We didn’t have any more bandages but we put pressure on each other’s scrapes until they stopped bleeding. I held my fingers along your cheek and arm. You pressed your palm into my forearm, the other across my chin.” “Steve, please…”_ )

He never told Bucky that he knew he owed debts to different guys across the neighborhood, no doubt to pay for the medical supplies they always seemed to have, the just-in-time refill before winter hit, the links of sausage that always appeared in the icebox for the ides of the month. And he never told him that there was no Louise McAdams or homeless man, that he let himself get beaten worse those days just to keep them from sullying Bucky’s name in their mouths. 

It always seemed to cycle back, how much they would dig into themselves for each other and let the sweat and grime and blood drip onto the hardwood floors, sink into the grain. Staining it. Because that was what would happen with hearts left on sleeves, disconnected arteries leaking and leaving a path that couldn’t quite get scrubbed away. When he laid awake at night, listening to the nocturnal desert birds cawing into the black, he counted the drops from Bucky’s veins that he’d helped prick out. _You got into that debt because of me. You stayed in the war for me. You’re suffering because of those past choices, and now because I left._ The sheets soaked through with sweat but the damp stains in the moonlight could have been blood the way they darkened the threads.

The moleskin with his list for the future was tucked into his back pocket and had years ago been folded to the curve of his tailbone. The list was smudged, crossed-out with additions squeezed into the corners; he flipped past it a few pages and pressed the tip of his pen into the blank page, pushed and pushed until the paper fell concave.

_1\. I’m sorry that I love you and can’t truly leave._  
_2\. I’m sorry that you love me and wouldn’t let me if I could.  
_ _3\. I’m sorry that I thought there was a middle ground when there was only more empty air and another gorge under our feet. But this time, at least, I fell after you._

The mood at the lab once he returned with three laden plastic bags and a melting cherry slushee had barely changed since his departure; if he had been paying attention that morning, he could have noticed that they had hardly moved, save for Selvig who had taken a perch behind Jane and Bruce, muttering alternative calibration settings to try for results that “made just a little more freakin’ sense.”

“I was kidding, you know that, don’t you?” Natasha said with a raised eyebrow when Steve set the vodka handle in front of her.

“It’ll save us a trip later.” He rubbed his face over his hands as he sat, nudging carefully at a sunburn on his nose that would heal over without peeling in ten minutes. The two of them eyed Darcy as she slowly pulled the bottle to her seat and splashed a shot into the slushee--she and Natasha smirked.

“You missed Tony getting into a Facetime argument with Rhodey, by the way,” she said with a straw between her teeth. The slushee pulsed out of the end of the straw, spilling over and in the fraction of a second before she licked her teeth, it sat like blood in the gaps.

\--- 

_REPORT 014 - 04252017_  
_SGT J.B. BARNES_  
_TO: CAPT S.G. ROGERS  
_ _ARLINGTON, VA_

_Steve--_

_How did you think of me before, when you found out? I know you saw my face on what they had made from the remains of my bones, like a transplant on the cusp of being rejected--you saw it but what did you_ see, _what did you know in that moment? Steve, I think the truth stains people. I think it stained you too. You learn that James Barnes put the bullets and knives through so many heads and limbs, and you can’t scrub it out. You look at me at there’s a smudge on the inside of your pupil. It puts the mask back on my face, smears my mouth shut. Your eye, it’s all in your eye but I can sense the pressure on my lips. A hand holding close, stifling. Not like when you’d catch me hovering over the coffee creamer on Saturday afternoons, and the push there from you would be lingering but soft. Smiling. They were always far too short. You would pull away, just barely, and we would be so close that our eyelashes tangled together and you looked at me, and it was back._

_There was a general here who worked that way but he could never hide how he could see right through his smudge for what it really is. Truth. My truth. I’m James Buchanan Barnes and I should be an enemy of the state. Everyone acts like I shouldn’t be. Like I’m not. You’re all broken records by now, all of you--it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you--and even though the confrontation with the general was unpleasant, I almost found it refreshing. Here was someone who got how I felt at the very deepest center of me. Traitor. Untrustworthy. With a fate barely rerouted from Gitmo. Steve, you’ve always understood me before anyone, if I’m putting that together right. Even before myself, sometimes. So when did you figure it out, what I really am? How long after that did it take you before you couldn’t stand to bare the inside of your throat to mine?_

_INCIDENT REPORTS  
_ _002 - Pentagon, VA_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _a general was rude to bucky & us by extension. maria went off. pretty sure the pentagon invited us to not come back, ever, but she and rhodey didn’t exactly tell us the specifics on that. typical. -c.b._

_(are you two okay? i mean, obviously not but--fuck. you know what i mean.)_

* * *

 

Steve’s phone pressed through the fabric of his jeans and into his thigh--there was a voicemail waiting there for him from an unknown number with a Los Angeles area code, minutes long, and he didn’t have the will to make a decision either way to listen to it or just erase it altogether. It couldn’t have been from Morita. No one else Steve knew lived out that way.

He could have easily stretched out his legs, shifted the phone in his pocket, even just slid it up on the table across the hall from where he was sitting, but the slight digging into the muscle--he thought it would keep his head from detaching from the surroundings or getting lost in itself. So he was uncomfortable: phone at the wrong angle, sitting on the hardwood floors outside the bathroom with his tailbone pointed right into the ground. After an hour, his legs had started to fall asleep.

The bathroom door was still locked. Or so he assumed. Loud, grating music with the questionable quality of phone speakers was still playing, and there was no way that even Steve’s ears could have heard the click. Either way, the door remained closed along with any indication that he was being invited in.

“Buck… do you need anything?” Nothing. And a little quieter, where he could barely hear himself over the music, “Please just say something.”

Nothing had been said since it started, nothing that got back to him at least. One minute they had been sprawled on the couch with Pepper’s copy of The Breakfast Club, and the next Bucky had mechanically risen and made a beeline for the bathroom. He had slammed the door and locked it before Steve had had time to process where he had gone.

It was all too apparent what was happening when there was a crack, then porcelain clinking onto tile. Muffled yelling into towels.

Half an hour in, Steve sent a distress signal to both Sam and Natasha, a group text-- _whichever one of you two can get here first, I need help. It’s Bucky and I don’t know what to do._

Natasha was on her way. And so was Sam, but she would be there first. He waited and waited, made sure to dig his bones into the floor and his phone into his leg until it all rang with numbness and he could just focus on doing and saying the right thing. He could fucking listen to the voicemail later, after Bucky had stabilized and there wasn’t a mission looming around the corner.

His phone buzzed, and he ignored the little notification flag by the phone icon. _Almost there, in the lobby_.

And then immediately after, or so it seemed, he couldn’t tell-- _open the fucking door Rogers don’t you hear me knocking_

Then: _why do you lock your front door anyway let me in I don’t have my key_

His head felt heavy as he stood, neck loose, blood thumping in his temples when he tried to shake off the static noise. Everything was happening too fast--“Natasha,” he said as he opened the door. “He’s locked himself in the bathroom. I don’t--”

“Sam’s coming. Traffic is hell from Jersey City.” She edged past him what most people would consider roughly but Steve knew was just how certain parts of her manifested themselves. Worry grew barbs along her shoulders and left dents in linoleum flooring, and if he squinted, he could almost see the divots behind her leading into the hall.

Someone shut the door, it must have been him, and he was giving her a rundown of the past day, two days, leaning across from each other on the kitchen island, and there came a point when he could sense the unstoppable babbling readying itself. He slammed his mouth shut mid-word. His phone felt heavy in his pocket. He still hadn’t listened to that voicemail. He hadn’t heard from Peggy’s nurse in a few days. He was supposed to help Thor set up for Jane’s birthday. There was too much to do--

“Steve. _Steve_. Look at me.” Natasha’s tilted his chin up and held it there, reaching all the way across the counter. “I’m glad you called me. Just hold on.”

His eyes unfocused more the further she walked away and towards the locked door, to the point where she was just a mesh of orange and black against the the white of the walls and her pale skin. The music blared on, lyrics indecipherable. She knocked and leaned her head into the jamb, rested a hand on the knob. And in Steve’s head, the singing, that grating low screaming or whatever it was supposed to be rang in his head, and she may have looked back at him or said something or made a motion for him to come join her, but it didn’t compute.

“Это будет в порядке,” she said. Waited. A few moments later she repeated it, three, four times, and her temple laid against the door. “я знаю… я знаю.”

How long she waited for Bucky to turn down the music Steve wasn’t sure--he was processing things in jolts, pressure building at standstills and rocketing forward--but eventually the music faded to nothing. They spoke to each other through the door in Russian, which Bucky had never purposely done around him before. The flawless accent his voice took on layered over the many missions with the Commandos when Bucky and Gabe tag-team interrogated a German scout they had found in their path; the accents meshed and grew dissonant, and one of his feet stood in the apartment, but the other was sinking into decades-old snow. 

And then the door was opening and his feet, one still in the ice, carried him to Natasha’s side and she held up a hand to his shoulder to keep him from running in too close. Bucky averted his gaze, collecting his phone from inside the medicine cabinet, and Steve didn’t try to catch it. Instead he traced the lines of the missing left corner of the sink, the trail of white rocky dust to the chunk at the edge of the toilet. _We can fix that, don’t worry_ , he almost said. But that wasn’t the issue. Nobody cared about the sink.

“I’m going to take Bucky upstate for a couple of days,” Natasha told him quietly. “I think I know what’s happening here. It’s going to be okay.”

She silently moved to the apartment door once Bucky crossed the threshold back into the hall, or she must have because that bright red of her hair wasn’t framing his peripheral vision anymore, and the only red he could focus on was the tinge of it around Bucky’s irises. The inflamed blood vessels highlighted by the pink tip of his nose. “Bucky--”

“I’m sorry,” he sniffed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry--” And his words caught passing over his teeth but his mouth kept moving, his hands kept gesturing like they were going to pull them back out--Steve closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around him, and the words started again, muffled into his shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” 

“But I am.”

“You don’t need to apologize to me. Or anyone.” 

The vibrations of Bucky’s voice hummed against his chest, and they were the sort of mumbles that felt like apologies, hidden in the fabric of his shirt where Bucky could still say them in peace, undisturbed. So Steve cradled his head until his shoulders stopped shaking and Natasha gave him a small, single nod from her watch by the door where she had indeed ended up after all.

“I love you,” he said, kissing Bucky on the forehead. “That’s not going to change, okay?”

Bucky nodded, squeezed his hand. Tried to get something out himself, but the words kept catching under his collarbone.

Natasha linked arms with him as they left, and before Steve could close the door behind them, he looked back. There was a sad smile on his face, lips thinned to nothing, and it was the look Steve used to see around dinner in the worst months of winter when the construction work was slow and wallets were thin. It was the look Bucky used to give him when he thought he’d let him down. And telling him no, _no of course you haven’t let me down, you never could_ \--it wouldn’t change a thing. It was possible he wouldn’t remember those nights, but Steve feared the likelihood that the thoughts in Bucky’s head were louder than anything he could say.

\--- 

“On your right.”

“Why the hell are you switching up on me, that is _dangerous_ \--”

And so was running through Central Park like he was during the middle of the day with tourists strolling the sidewalks without any concept of right-of-way. Just another challenge, really. Something to keep his mind occupied as well as his body. He had sorely needed it, or something that could have done the trick--when Sam arrived at his place after the hellish drive from Jersey City, the first words out of his mouth were, “You look like you could use a barrel of Thor’s mead or a run, so we’re doing the second one.”

Steve was pushing himself a little harder than normal and even his serum-laden muscles were starting to burn with the lactic acid.

“On your left.”

“MAKE UP YOUR MIND, ROGERS.”

Central Park was one of the few places around New York that had changed in ways that, compared to the rest of the city, were almost negligible. The paths still wound around the lawns and under the footbridges, almost the same flowers bloomed in the spring, and Belvedere Castle still stood proudly behind the Met. The altered skyline always managed to loom over him and cast its long shadow all the way past the other joggers and their iPods, down to the roads with new car models that hardly spluttered at all when they started up--but the trees were the same. They had to be the same trees, just older. Just thicker around the trunks with new rings to tell their history: the scorching summers, the hurricanes, the feet-deep snowstorms.

“On your left.” 

“How are you lapping me, where are you even turning around--”

And he could have answered, but he had already sprinted a number of yards down the path and around a lemonade vendor by the time the reply even formed in his head.

 _See Sam,_ he could have said, _Central Park isn’t the Tidal Basin or the National Mall. It’s not a loop. You make do._ Making do usually meant doubling back through the grass and running up behind him again once he was out of sight.

By the time they had made it all the way to the Balto statue near the zoo, the sweat stain on the front of Sam’s shirt had inched far enough down that Steve was ready to offer to throw in the towel. He rubbed some sweat from his hairline as Sam bent over, one hand reaching for the statue to steady him.

“You training to race a bullet train or something?” he panted.

“Do I need a reason to push myself?”

Sam lifted his head and shot him a raised eyebrow. “In case you forgot, the alternative choice to this farce was drinking heavily, so excuse me if I don’t play along,” he said after a moment. “Man, I have _got_ to sit down.”

“There’s a bench over there?”

“Too far. Here’s good.” He leaned up against the base of the statue, the sweat along the bridge of his nose shining brighter than the dull gleam along the bronze dog’s back. “Dude, sit down. You have to be a little tired.” 

He was. Just a little, which was more than usual, to be fair. They sat in silence for a few minutes as Sam’s breath slowed to a normal rate, quieted from the edge of gasping. It was a comfortable space that held all the layers of lunch with a muted Nationals game on the television and untranslated pages of Russian on the counter and sharing looks as someone else’s drama unfolded before them in the Tower’s top-floor common area. Layers years thick, a soft landing when things grew difficult and they needed somewhere to rest.

“Did Natasha tell you?” Steve asked however long later. 

“Yeah. Not the details, obviously.”

“Obviously.” A beat later: “Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

Sam sighed, shook his head to get his thoughts together. “Each person’s different. But he’s got us. He’s got you.”

The shadows stretched and contorted as the sun moved across the sky--neither of them needed the rest by that point, and even the sweat had completely dried from their shirts, but they leaned their heads back on the rock and watched the crowds, the clumsily-folded maps, the mothers and their strollers. No one paid them any mind, not even a noticeable passing glance. But as the time drew on, Steve’s phone started to weigh like lead in his pocket again, like it had gained mass in the circles he ran around Sam, taking cue from the trees with every loop.

“Do you mind if I check my voicemail? There’s been one there I just… I meant to listen to it earlier--”

“You don’t have to ask, man.”

He pulled it out, tested the weight in his hand, and it felt normal. The 818 area code on the voicemail list stood out in red, unlistened to, because there was someone in Los Angeles area who needed to talk to him long enough to leave a hefty message. It could be nothing, he reminded himself, because Los Angeles could mean a number of different things or nothing at all. It didn’t have to be _bad_.

The voice that greeted him once he hit play sounded worn with age but still talked quickly despite it, and there was a familiarity to it he couldn’t quite place--

_“I hope this is the right number because Lord knows Peg’s handwriting in that address book is god awful and I’m the only one who can read it anyway, but I hope this is the right person since your number didn’t have a name with it--it’d be a shame if I had to repeat all this again. Oh, anyway. My name’s Angie, I’m an old friend of Peggy’s. I had to fly back home to pick up a few things I wanted her to have by her bed now that--you know. Your number had a star next to it in the address book so I assume you know. Everyone with a star gets the bad phone calls. Though they do tend to call me first._

_“Which is why I’m calling. They called me first and I thought I should tell you this rather than them. And don’t panic, I can sense your panic from the future whenever you get this, she’s still with us. Just had a bit of a mental slide, is all. Or what it sounded like. Not another stroke, but maybe it was just the dementia itself. Her main nurse, that lovely girl Fatima, she told me Peg kept asking who the two girls in the photo were by her bed, every minute or so, just couldn’t keep it in her head, and Fatima, that patient angel, just kept telling her, ‘That’s you and Angie, that’s you and Angie,’ and I guess after the hundredth time Peggy got embarrassed and finally asked who Angie was. I’m still in LA. Haven’t seen her yet since the phone call but I don’t know--I don’t know if my old mug now will help her know._

_“Fatima said she needed to call you too, and probably Sharon but she wasn’t sure yet. But definitely you. There are so many pictures on Peg’s table that I forget who all’s there, but you must be pretty important because Fatima showed Peggy your picture next and she seemed out of it. Oh, she knew you. But Fatima told me that Peg said something like, ‘oh that small recruit, he struggled with the push-ups today.’ Wasn’t right. Doesn’t sound right even to me and I don’t even know who you are._

_“I’m headed back to DC in the next couple of days, probably for the foreseeable future. If you’re in the area and want to grab a coffee or talk or something, you have my number now. Any friend of English is liable to be a friend of mine.”_

\---

“Steve?”

Sam didn’t want to call what he was seeing the thousand-yard stare, but it was the only phrase coming to mind.

“Steve, you dropped your phone. What happened?”

He snuck a peek at the screen--the voicemail was over, and he wasn’t sure if Steve was listening to him or even if he could at that point. Thousand-yard stare. Shutting down. Something was in that voicemail that he hadn’t needed or wanted to hear, and there were too many options that it could have been for Sam to even make a stab at saying anything that could help. Was a descendant of one of the Winter Soldier’s victims filing a civil suit? Was Jim Morita in the hospital? Did Peggy’s nursing home call again with news of another stroke, a big one this time? Steve wasn’t crying yet, and whether or not that was a good thing was completely up for debate.

They didn’t move, not from their seats at the foot of the statue. But Sam moved, turning to face Steve with his legs crossed, a hand on his shoulder, and Steve spine seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking under the weight of his massive shoulders that wanted to droop onto his knees. A smaller Steve Rogers in Central Park, resting after chasing off Group of Assholes Number Three--it must have been an image Bucky saw so many times. At least more than once. Variations on a theme, and now there was the Steve of the future in the same position, but the assholes had come back to haunt him in new, unrecognizable ways.

“I picked up some stuff to make pierogis the other day,” he said after a while. “None of the frozen ones that I know Natasha stashes at your place. Real stuff. And there’s Gatorade in the fridge and I think HBO has a marathon of--”

“It’s Peggy.”

The hand went back to his shoulder only to have it droop more, away from his touch, so he pulled it back.

“Something happened. I don’t think she remembers me anymore.” He rose to his feet, picking the bits of grass and dirt from his pants, and set off down the path that led back towards the Tower looming over the treeline. Sam grabbed the abandoned phone and ran to catch him, but he didn’t offer the phone back. He could carry that for him, if he wouldn’t be allowed to carry much else for the moment.

When they got to the pond, Steve paused by the edge of the path, eyed the black-eyed susans just beyond his feet and the ducks paddling to the center. “This keeps happening. Makes me wonder if one day I’m going to forget too.” His mouth twitched to the side, a grin reconsidered and thrown away by the way he glanced at Sam then back at his feet. The flowers. The ducks. And back to his feet again before he kept going.

And that was the last he said of it. Sam didn’t pry; he had learned it never got anywhere with Steve, only sealed him up further, and as he prepared the pierogis back in his kitchen, the way Steve tossed jokes at him--juggled, around the back, with a couple flips, showy as hell--it was almost as if the whole afternoon had been drained away into the storm sewer around that last corner coming home. But it would travel, he knew it would travel, it would float through the pipes and into the treatment plant, but the chemicals couldn’t change what it was. It couldn’t change that it would stay the same at the core once it fell into the Hudson, the Atlantic, got sucked up into the sky and rained back in the reservoir, back in range, just to get caught in his throat again when he least expected it.

* * *

 

Clint sighed with his tongue caught between his teeth, forcing half a raspberry out with his boredom. “Why are we meeting at a high school? I thought I was done with high school.”

“I think you’re probably wrong about that in a number of different ways,” Sam deadpanned, which earned a nod from Maria.

She hadn’t looked up from her phone in about fifteen minutes, scrolling through some lengthy briefing file or maybe just Twitter--none of them was completely sure or had the gall to ask. They were supposed to be meeting a contact, perhaps their last one left in the area, in a wide time window outside the Langley High School gym entrance. After a couple hours, the window was starting to come to a close--the sun had started to inch down toward the horizon, Clint was growing more and more antsy, and the coaches lugging heft net bags of volleyballs out of their car trunks were staring curiously at Bucky’s metal arm and Clint’s bow strapped to his back.

“I think we need to start accepting the fact we got stood up,” Bucky said flatly.

“She wouldn’t do that,” said Maria. She still didn’t look up from her phone. “There’s still half an hour left.”

“Yeah, and in twenty-eight minutes I’m getting back in my car and heading straight back to the highway because something’s obviously up.” Rhodey shot her a look that was normally reserved for Tony, but she didn’t acknowledge it at all. “Look, all I’m saying is that clearly we can’t trust our old people, Maria. Half those generals at the Pentagon used to be my buddies. Bonilla, too. Look where that got us.”

“That’s nice. This is different.”

“Maria--”

“ _James_.”

They kept grumbling lowly to themselves, and Sam and Clint rolled their eyes at each other. “Hey,” Clint said, tapping Bucky on the shoulder. “How’re you feeling?”

“Uh. Fine?”

It had been worth a shot by Clint’s estimation, and he wouldn’t change his mind even when Sam made the motion to cut it out across his throat. They hadn’t seen the note pretending to be a daily report that had been faxed to New Mexico. And he hadn’t exactly meant to read it, but the blinking error message had caught his eye, and then he’d accidentally read the whole thing. What could he have done? The reports weren’t supposed to be that long, just summaries. A line or two, even, if that’s what would get the jist across. (“But more than three words, Barton, good god,” Fury’s voice said in his head.)

And they were sitting in that godforsaken parking lot waiting on someone who may or may not show up, with nothing else better to do, and Clint wanted to help. He wanted to help like he wanted to breathe, it was so ingrained in him, and having to stay at arm’s length knowing that the head that had written that note was under that skin and skull--he was fit to burst. Sam knew, which must have been why he elbowed him in the side after a few minutes.

“Clint’s got a point you know,” Bucky said. “Why a high school? Won’t this look suspicious? Especially with--” He glanced at his left arm.

“Wasn’t my idea, you know--oh, she’s here.” Maria tucked her phone into her breast pocket as a black sedan drove down into the lot, pulling up a few rows down. “I was starting to get worried,” she called down to the car.

“Traffic, sorry,” came the voice from behind the open front door. “I had to run out of the office for something and then there was a pile-up on 66.” A blonde head emerged from the car and her eyebrows shot up as she scanned the sight before her. “Didn’t know you were bringing the whole crew.”

“I don’t think she thinks she can leave us alone,” Clint said.

“He’s kind of right,” Maria said. “Children, Sharon Carter, former SHIELD.”

Sharon nodded at each of them once she joined the gathering around their own vehicle, but it was brief, most of her attention centering itself back on Maria. Any trace of that lighthearted frustration vanished almost immediately, and while Maria hadn’t specified exactly what role “former SHIELD” was supposed to have entailed, they could guess just from the demeanor alone that it had to have been fairly high up.

“Did you get a chance to read the file I sent you?” Sharon asked.

“Just finished it, actually.” Maria paused, arching an eyebrow. “And where the hell did you even get it?”

“Friends in high places… who know their way around the low places. Probably better not to ask.”

Clint tried to catch the eye of Sam--and then when that failed, Bucky and Rhodey, and then even the last straggling volleyball coach lugging in a case of Gatorade into the gym across the lot. _Can you believe this? Yes, even you Volleyball Civilian. Former top SHIELD and I don’t know who she is!_ None of them looked, which he admitted was probably for the better.

“Care to fill the rest of us in?” Rhodey asked, and he officially became Clint’s hero of the day.

A lot of what her theory comprised of was based on speculation, Sharon warned, speculation and a few long hours of digging through old paper files when she was supposed to be on lunch and trusting that none of the guards watching the CCTV feeds would find her activity memorable. Old files led to overhearing conversations, and then further, to reaching out with questionable radio connections across the Atlantic before a password-encrypted file would land in her inbox from a disposable email.

“Fury?” Maria asked.

“I assume. It wasn’t signed or anything, but it’s definitely his style.”

With SHIELD virtually nonexistent and with no real power--(“ _Virtually_ nonexistent?” “The Avengers still technically count as SHIELD, Sam.” “No real power though?” _“Sam.”_ )--the agency’s former duties were haphazardly split among the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DARPA, and a handful of assignments were sent to MI6 and Interpol as well. Tackling the newly-revealed threat of Hydra was divvied up with just as little organization, much of the details and chain of command being lost in the shuffle of long email threads, meeting requests, and petty power-brokering bargains.

“Basically,” Sharon said, “if you wanted to be assigned to a Hydra case, you were opting for anarchy. It was a lot of old SHIELD from the good side who had stayed in the industry, plus a few idealist recruits fresh from college who watched the whole thing go down from their dorm rooms. Wasn’t something people wanted to touch if they weren’t invested. Too messy and very dangerous.”

But she still had Fury’s old satellite phone number when the radios fell through, the one he only gave out to particular agents at a particular point during their field career, something to leave in back pockets for a worst case scenario. And the number still worked. Their conversations were always brief, but new intel would find its way into her computer the next morning without fail--the file currently stored in Maria’s phone was dated about a year earlier from Hydra cell in a small town north of Chihuahua, Mexico, and it had records of shipments from New York and New Jersey cells, references to weapons training, new technology.

“So... uh--” Clint said slowly.

“Hydra got their hands on Chitauri tech after the Battle of New York,” Bucky interrupted. “Right? That’s what this whole thing is about?” There was a beat before Sharon nodded. “Jesus.”

“When Maria mentioned to me that Dr. Foster’s research had picked up Chitauri transmissions, I thought there might be something there,” Sharon said. “But a few bills of lading and receipts weren’t really definite. Wasn’t until the readings started getting weird that I sent it along.”

“Speaking of,” Maria said, holding up a hand. “I’ve been having trouble getting in touch with--well, anyone down in Puente Antiguo lately. Have the reports said anything about them figuring out what was going on with the readings?”

All eyes turned towards Bucky, and the effort he put in trying not to shift uncomfortably was obvious. “I, um.” One hand touched briefly to his back pants pocket, coming back to massage his temple. “No, no. Nothing yet. It seems like getting any information out of them on the research is impossible, much less an actual… report or something.”

His hand stayed right above his eye, rubbing circles one finger at a time, three each from forefinger to pinky and back again, until the attention shifted back to Maria and Sharon. Clint kept watching him, watched as those same fingers drifted back to his pocket and traced the outline of something real--or imagined. His other hand, the metal one, glared in the setting sun and tapped against his leg. Eyes glazed over, fidgety. He wasn’t completely there.

“At any rate,” Maria said with a huff, and both Clint and Bucky’s heads snapped back into the conversation. “El Puerto is half a day’s drive from where the rest of us are, so we ought to go join them. There’s no such thing as being overly cautious when it’s…” She was reaching for the words, balancing her composure like a vertical broomhandle in her palm, and coherent speech fell to the wayside in the effort.

“I know.” Sharon put a hand on her shoulder. “But if there _is_ trouble, like worst case scenario sort of thing, please let me know if I can help.”

As the sun continued to set, turning the crowns of the trees and rooftops a vibrant orange, they started moving slowly to their cars. The handles seemed to stick more than usual, the keys more difficult to sort through. Each step on the pavement turned the oranges a little more red, a little more violent--Clint remembered something about a red sky at sunset being a good omen to sailors, but did it mean the same thing on land? Even if he hadn’t been paying complete attention during their rendezvous, the dread was contagious, airborne, and he wondered if the students at volleyball practice inside could sense it too.

“Wait, Sharon--” Bucky said right as both of them were halfway climbing into their cars. “How… how is your aunt doing?”

Sharon’s face tensed, but only long enough to throw a grin on top of it. “She’s good, she’s really good. And… uh, how are _you_ doing?”

“You know. Never better.”

\---

_REPORT 015 - 04292017_  
_CAPT S.G. ROGERS_  
_TO: SGT J.B. BARNES  
_ _PUENTE ANTIGUO, NM_

_Buck--_

_You wanted to know what I saw when I look at you._

_I see you. Deeply._

_I don’t know if that afternoon at the Met when we were in high school is a memory that stuck around, but in case it’s not: we went to the museum one Saturday because they had a couple exhibits I wanted to see and you didn’t want me to go alone, because if anyone could start a fight in an art museum, it was me. Some of the paintings we looked at, we got really up close, and our noses were a nudge away from touching the dried oils. The paint sat on some of those canvases in globs. Great heaping globs of flower petals and grass, shading in the night sky. If we picked at we could have seen all the different layers down to the bottom._

_That’s what I mean, deeply. Your face is thick to me. There’s you before the war, orange; during the war, navy. And there’s you now, in the present, a soft yellow even when you’re angry with me. In corners there’s that bright shade of pink your lips get after you kiss me, and along those edges is a blinding white when our chests touch, flush and bare against each other. Everywhere in between exists there too, but it’s not mine to name. I see it all. And you’re still the most important damn person in the world to me, and knowing that I made you question that--I can’t even apologize for that. It wouldn’t be enough._

_I never meant to hurt you. I never wanted to dilute that golden yellow around your eyes whenever you look at me._

_I know I never told you enough, I never let you in, and I put too much on myself. It collapsed on us both. And I should have known that I could never be Atlas, even just for myself. I tried to carry you on my shoulders when I was already walking on glass, and I didn’t know how to ask you to walk beside me. I saw the cuts already on your own feet, and I couldn’t do that to you, even when I needed it._

_I’m not asking for a second chance at everything. I just want to start over._

_Hi. I’m Steve Rogers. Thank you for pulling Robbie Mason off me before he broke my nose. Do you want to share my sandwich?_

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _You know Maria has to file these later, right? -NR_

_PACK YOUR BAGS AND GET TO NM PLEASE WE HAVE A SITUATION, BETTER EXPLAINED IN PERSON - TS_

* * *

 

The landscape below was dark and rippled, mountains descending into desert and back up again, and even when Steve squinted through the small windows of the plane there wasn’t a sign of any town for miles--no lights, no visible road. Just the undulating waves of the hills and brown earth turned grey in the night. Maria had said they were getting close just minutes earlier, and usually there were signs to corroborate the news.

“I don’t think this place is exactly a booming metropolis, though,” Bucky said over the engine.

And he was right. The briefing the day before had said as much: a quick job in southern Eritrea, dropping in, and extracted with a box of files in hand.

“Fury followed some of his leads from Europe down to the DRC,” Maria had told them, “and, of course, he only found more threads to follow all over the rest of the continent. He found that one of Hydra’s cells was based out of land that had been contested during the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the nineties. He’s got some interest in some files there.” Her lips had pursed, the now-recognized universal symbol not to inquire further--Fury clearly hadn’t told her why he was so interested, just that a few Avengers needed to drop into Tserona, and quickly, thank you very much.

“I looked at this area on Google Maps last night,” Bucky continued. “It’s so isolated. Quiet, I bet.” A grin was starting to grow across his face, absently almost, as if he wasn’t aware of what his mouth was doing.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. How did we never notice New York was so loud before?”

“I mean, I couldn’t hear well most of my life, so--”

“You know what I mean. And stop looking at me like that,” he added. “I’m fine. They gave me four weeks off, that was more than enough.”

But Steve couldn’t help but look at him like he was, or so he guessed--because he certainly wasn’t aware of any look he had been giving Bucky from their seats across from each other. It had been four weeks since his latest episode, four weeks since Peggy’s mini-stroke, and in the last two he had finally felt the waves settle and their grounding stabilize. Bucky was sleeping through the night again, and the updates from the St. Mary’s nurses left on his voicemail appeared to be heading towards something positive. There was sense in what Bucky was saying, but something in his gut was still wary at giving a blanket green light.

“You know this is our first mission solo together since the war, right?”

He glanced up at Bucky and found him smiling, teeth showing and all with the glow rising up through his cheeks and outwards, the pulse crashing against Steve’s chest just like it used to.

“You remember that mission?”

“You and I hid from a bunch of Germans in a near-freezing pond,” he said. “That’s not exactly something people can take from you easily.”

Something garbled from the cockpit aired over the lone speaker on the cabin ceiling, and the light next to it turned from red to green. Whatever Maria had said, it must have meant _get up, remember the coordinates, it’s time to jump_ , because in seconds Bucky was already behind him and holding him still. One hand laid on his hip as the other clumsily yanked the parachute straps over his arms.

“I can get this myself, Buck.”

“Oh you can, can you?”

“It was one time…”

Bucky tightened the harnesses from behind, hands working blind as his head rested on Steve’s shoulder--long, calm exhales brushed against Steve’s neck with the end of his nose, and he couldn’t help but tense up. Those were the exact coping mechanisms he had overheard Bruce telling him over lunch, down to the durations of each breath, and Bucky said he was fine, he _said_ he was fine, but--

The door to the cockpit slammed open and jolted Bucky’s hands off his chest with the noise. “Damn intercom’s busted,” Maria called over her shoulder. “Drop point’s in thirty seconds. So get your chute on, Barnes.”

He gave her a small salute before half hopping over to his parachute, pulling it on, and Steve watched his fingers fiddle with the straps, the soft clinks of his left thumb against the metal hooks and sliders, how he was having the slightest bit of trouble getting everything in its proper place. But it fit before long--an infinite stretch of a few seconds--and the grin was back, plastered on his face like it had been there the entire time.

“You ready?” Not a single waver in his voice.

“Are you?”

“Steve.”

“You two better hope you’re ready,” Maria yelled, “because you’ve got ten seconds to open that hatch and be in the air and I’m not turning this plane around if you--”

Another salute, more confident this time, with a hint of a kind of brazen winking tilt to it that had to be coming from inside of him--because who else knew how Bucky had carried himself before the war broke out and had cared enough to record it in a place where he could have found it? And then the door was open, air roaring in with the growl of the engines and the dark expanse of the countryside was open below them--

“Steve, why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“ _Jump, dammit!”_ Maria yelled again, and they gripped at each other, catching their arms, and leapt into the nothingness.

On the way down, Steve thought he caught a glimpse of the whites of Bucky’s teeth in a grinning grimace, a _well that won’t be a fun debriefing, will it?_ with a slow fade--the white disappeared slowly, then all at once, as if Bucky had suddenly turned away. It was too dark to tell.

They landed behind a gathering of rusting c-containers half a mile from what Maria had outlined as the main road, though even after waiting ten minutes for their eyes to adjust, the road was difficult to discern from the surrounding landscape.

“How are we supposed to find the building if we can’t even find the road into the town?” Bucky muttered, shrugging off the parachute. “I don’t get it, the road was plenty clear on that Google Maps thing--”

“Shh.” Steve put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder as he peeked around the edge of the container. A few dots of light were wobbling in the distance at a walking pace. “I think we found it.”

Now that his eyes had adjusted, he could see the outline of Bucky’s head nod once, then motion over his shoulder to follow him. They moved parallel to the unknown travelers, staying low and trying to avoid making any sound that couldn’t be explained away by the wind or a distant storm--stealth hadn’t always been Steve’s forte, but he would always manage in urban environments at least, or where snow could muffle even the heaviest footfalls. But here in the edge of the desert, where the ground cracked open and crumbled under his toes and the twigs of drying plants rattled as he passed, every movement echoed tenfold against the flat of Bucky’s back ahead of him. And Bucky was so quiet that the echoes were the only thing convincing him that he was even still there, that he hadn’t wandered off and lost track of him in the dark.

It hadn’t been quite like that in wherever they had been that night of their last solo mission during the war--somewhere as the borders between Austria, Italy, and Yugoslavia had started to converge--just the two of them shifting their way through the woods with careful steps, tailing the German scouts. Bucky had stepped on a few dead leaves, had kicked a rock into the bushes, and he was still the best stealth option the Commandos had. But this--this was another level. This was the missing gap, the reminder that seventy years passed differently between the two of them.

After fifteen minutes, Bucky grabbed at his arm to stop. Their beacons of light kept moving, then flickered in and out of sight as they passed along the first houses of Tserona, finally disappearing into a small building where another smaller path branched off the main.

 _Three-quarters of a mile past the large rectangular structure on the edge of town_ , Maria’s voice said in Steve’s head, _the road turns sharply north, and Fury pinned down the first significant house on the left as the one you need to get into. Hydra has taken over its basement_.

Steve tapped Bucky on the shoulder and pointed to the gray building, barely indistinguishable against the rest of the town’s low roofline. A couple nods, and they were off again, the road much more clear with the footprints and worn earth in stark contrast with what they had faced on the outskirts.

Bucky was darting around the houses like he had done this before, snuck around remote villages on the other side of walls from where families were sleeping and the scent of dinner still stuck to the air--and he had, he _had_ to have done this before, how could he keep forgetting? Remembering who he had been didn’t mean that all traces of who they had made him become would suddenly wash away--the mindset, yes, that was gone, but the skills were still there. And Steve was grateful for it, the ease of this part of their mission, because even if he could have managed without Bucky leading, the time to prepare for whoever they found in that basement , that had to count for something. That had to be a plus.

Steve must have gone on autopilot--or, not completely, but enough that when Bucky finally stopped around the corner from their target building’s entrance, he nearly ran into him. He could sense that he was giving him a look, checking in, but Steve shook his head and nodded toward the front. Focus was back on, it didn’t matter, they were there now--get a twenty on the door, check the perimeter, those could come to the forefront, not some momentary spaciness.

The roofs of the few surrounding buildings appeared empty, just like the rest of the town, but the problem laid in the state of the building they were supposed to be sneaking into--the windows were boarded completely with plywood, as was the cut-out where the door should have been. Despite the latest intelligence from Fury stating this was an active Hydra base, no noise came from inside, and a bubble of panic tried to swell in Steve’s chest at the thought that their intel was faulty, that it could be a waste of time--or a trap.

But it burst and subsided once he felt Bucky’s gloved hands graze his cheek to get his attention. Another check-in, a quirk of his eyebrow, and Steve gave him a thumbs up. They couldn’t risk making any noise, not even too much movement of their feet on the dry ground, so they started to resort to bits of mangled sign language that they had managed to pick up from Clint--and Natasha too, when they got into private, wild, gesticulating arguments in full view of the rest of the team.

Bucky tapped at his temple then made a motion like he was kicking down a door. _I think we should just kick down the door._ A pair of finger guns. _Catch them by surprise._

Steve pointed at him and waved his index finger in circles, pointed at his temple. _You’re crazy._ He crossed his two index fingers in front of him, then separated them with is full arm span, throwing his right arm in front of him like he was pitching a baseball. _We need a different way!_

His breathing started getting labored, and he knew the panic was back, and a repetitive chorus of _why now why now why is this a problem_ started running in his head, and before long Bucky’s hands were on his shoulders, his forehead leaning against his own, and all the stress and vibrations leaked out down his toes. Bucky pulled back, shook his head while tapping his wrist. _No time_. Pointed at himself, then held his right index finger to his left thumb. _I’ll go in first_.

Out of all the things Bucky could have said to reassure him, that was on the bottom of the list. He reached futilely for the signs to communicate what he wanted to say-- _we don’t know what’s in there, I can’t let something happen to you_ \--so he just shook his head. Gestured towards himself. If anyone was going to go in first, it would be him. Not Bucky. _I heal faster_ , he tried to sign, holding both of his fists up, then flicking up his thumbs.

He could tell Bucky wanted to argue, but he only nodded. Couldn’t risk sighing as hard as he wanted to, so he ran his hands over his eyes and grabbed Steve’s face and held it fervently, staring through the dark into the light-starved pupils. Slowly he pulled away, held his hands in front him, crossed at the wrist and fingers splayed--he brought them down, and as he did so, he pulled them into a fist. _I trust you._ But he didn’t need sign language to tell him that he still thought it was a stupid idea--it was written all over his face.

They checked the perimeter again, the roofs again, peered down the paths and dusty alleys to be sure everyone was off the streets--and they moved. One step, then another, keeping flat along the wall, ducking under the blocked-out windows just in case, and the boarded-up door laid before them. The patterns in the wood grain stared back at them as a family down the road laughed raucously at a joke neither of them could understand. _Are you sure, are you sure, are you sure,_ it rolled off Bucky in waves, that thought, and yes, Steve was sure. He had to be.

Later, when he would try to tell Maria during the debriefing what exactly had occurred, Steve would say that everything happened in slow motion. He kicked down the door, threw his shield in front of his face, and then every movement landed like it was pushing through water or syrup to meet its target, and all he could do was watch from the floor. And while Steve Rogers was never a good liar, he managed that day alone in her office, and he supposed that the slow motion granted some weight to the narrative, the weight that he felt after realizing what had happened--so even if it wasn’t objectively true, the report would at least feel true emotionally, and that was what mattered. The real sequence of events was immaterial.

When Steve kicked down the door to that building in Tserona, the wood splintered into nothing, he was face-to-face with a group of four European men with cigars between their teeth and guns at their hips, and one European man whose pistol was already in his hands and rising quickly to the spot right between Steve’s eyes.

A hand on the back of his collar shoved him to the floor, shield clanging and digging into his chest at all the wrong angles, and rolling over, peeling his eyes open--the same man’s face was slumped against the floor inches from him, eyes blank and a bullet hole in his forehead. Four more shots rang out through a silencer, and four muffled thumps followed after.

“Bucky--”

Bucky turned on his heel, gun cocked and finger on the trigger, aiming down where Steve had fallen, and the wild blank sheen to his eyes was something straight out of his nightmares from years ago, ducking knives outside Capitol South. It dropped away just as quickly as he recognized it. The gun clattered the ground, and Bucky right after, down to his knees with his hands over his ears.

“Bucky, Bucky, hey--”

“Oh my god, _fuck--_ ”

The other four men had crumpled where they stood, the same red mark in the dead center of their heads. Blood was starting to pool under them, and Steve moved himself as quickly as he could manage so he would be between Bucky’s line of sight and the larger half of the bodies. “Stay right here, I’m going to go get the files and call Maria to extract us, okay?” Bucky didn’t respond, just gripped harder at the sides of his head. “Bucky?”

“Okay, okay…”

The stairs down to the basement were thankfully in plain sight, and the files even more so, laid out right on the lone table in the entire room. The corners of the box were soft and worn down, the ink labeling its contents faded from what must have been a vibrant blue, and the curls and lines of the foreign scripts blurred before his eyes. A moment later, the air was too close, overwhelmingly stale with a trace of something toxic; blinking, coughing, a few hot streaks of tears fell down his face, and he tried to stifle the wracking noises he knew were coming in his hands, to catch them and put them back until he could afford to feel this. Whatever it was.

\--- 

On the flight back, Bucky dozed against his shoulder and gripped his hand on the edge of too tightly, the numb tingling setting in before they had gotten halfway over Sudan.

Steve fell asleep with the rest of his hand. He dreamed of the streets below their last apartment in Brooklyn as it was in 1941: muted by his colorblindness with that old familiar skyline, but the streets were empty. He walked it alone. No cuts of pork and beef hung from the butcher’s window, no one was stocking the shelves at the pharmacy. Around the corner, Brooklyn Antiques was abandoned, and a lone Lucky Star cab was parked at the curb. The city was the quietest it had ever been.

* * *

 

_REPORT 016 - 04302017_  
_SGT J.B. BARNES_  
_TO: CAPT S.G. ROGERS  
_ _CLARKSBURG, WV_

_I don’t want to start over, Steve, and even if we could, why would I want to? I’ve done enough forgetting to last me the rest of my time in this life. It’s not something I’m going to willingly make myself do for the sake of trying to rectify, what? Our missteps? Bad timing?_

_This is where we are now. I’m so tired of talking about where we’ve been. Not that it isn’t important. But I’ve been back in the world for years now and it’s all anyone is concerned with, and I know I’ve been just as guilty of it too. Do I remember this or that, are the memories coming back as they should or have they been warped in the process, and I realized this morning that I don’t care! I don’t care anymore, Steve! What I have is what I have and I want to spend more time thinking about what we’re all going to do for Thanksgiving this year or if they’re going to find anymore weirdos to add to our ranks._

_Right now, though, all of us on my end are thinking about the note Tony added to your last report--if you didn’t notice the location where I’m sending this from, you’ll see we’ve left Washington. We had to drive about four hours out of our way to find a plane to borrow to get us out to New Mexico, but we’re coming. Please be careful. For once._

_ADDITIONAL REMARKS  
_ _Someone else is doing these reports next time, for the record. We received intel from CIA contact about the issue. Please listen to Natasha and Bruce and don’t make any rash decisions. This may be more complicated than we originally thought. - MH_

_Thor, go ahead and put Mjolnir on Steve so he doesn’t run off and do something stupid. - SW_

\--- 

_From: tony@starkindustries.com_  
_To: mhill@starkindustries.com_  
_Subject: Spill the beans  
_ _! This message was sent with high importance_

_IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION PLEASE LET US KNOW_

_From: mhill@starkindustries.com_  
To: tony@starkindustries.com  
Subject: RE: Spill the beans

_Turn capslock off, Tony._

_I’m not sending anything sensitive over email. Keep an eye to the south. We will be there in a few hours._

\---

“Keep an eye to the south? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Tony muttered. The latest print-outs from what Jane and Bruce had finally agreed were the right calculations and settings were under his elbow in a crumpled mess, sliding dangerously close to the edge of the table under the weight of his head. “She honestly couldn’t tell us more than that?”

“Email is hackable,” Natasha said from her usual spot at the side table with Steve. She was flipping through an old back issue of one of Jane’s science magazines and barely took time to look up. “Stark Industries’ especially.”

“Wh--how do you--”

“Is now really the time?” Steve said abruptly.

Tony huffed and tried to catch Bruce’s eye on the other side of the lab, but he was intent on being wherever he was that wasn’t there, his blank, sullen gaze falling on the black screen of the computer. “All I’m saying though,” he said, spinning slowly in his chair, “is that if we were in such a dire situation--which we are, mind you--I think it would be worth the risk of hacking.”

Steve ran his hand over his face and did a poor job of suppressing a groan.

“Did you know,” Natasha said with the fakest enthusiasm anyone had ever heard, even from Clint when Sam would talk about the Carolina Hornets, “that supergravity is supposed to be eleven-dimensional?”

Tony did know that, presumably, but he kept it to himself.

The mood was somber and the air felt as heavy as the two stories above them--pressing down, the pressure of waiting. The results had started reading back the same no matter how the settings were adjusted, no matter what formulas were used--first the Chitauri existed, and then they were in the solar system, and then they were on Earth. Somewhere, they didn’t know exactly, but to the south if Maria’s latest email was to be taken at face value. Thor had already taken Jane, Darcy, and Selvig out of Puente Antiguo, to either the Tower or the underground labs at the Culver University physics department--Jane still had the key to her father’s old lab, and Bruce was able to dig his own keycard out the back of his wallet.

This was the part of war Steve always loathed: looking down at your hands and the stretch of your legs and wondering where the new scars would lie. Dwelling on the people around you and hoping there wouldn’t be an empty seat on the way back. Something deep and primal wanting to run but being too proud to listen to it.

(Thor offered to take Tony back to the Tower, and Tony refused to acknowledge that Thor had said anything. “No one will fault you if you wish to sit this out,” he had said, but Tony had shaken his head stiffly and gotten up to keep tinkering with the suit he had been rebuilding since SHIELD fell.)

It was almost the same feeling that started deep in his stomach the entire flight to Austria the night he invaded the Hydra base. Howard at the cockpit, Peggy before him, and almost no words to breach the gulf that started at the edge of their toes: he was overly aware of the thought at the back of their heads, that the USO was probably going to lose their headliner.

That same gulf was opening up again.

“Keep an eye to the south. Which way even _is_ south?” Tony absently flicked a few bolts off the table, and Bruce rolled his eyes.

“There’s an app for that, isn’t there?” said Steve.

“Look at you, knowing things.”

“You know,” Natasha said, “we could do something other than sit here like we’re waiting for our own funerals.” Tony and Bruce pointedly started inspecting the bookshelves on the far end of the lab or just their own fingernails. “Like formulate a plan? We’ve fought these things before.” She threw Steve a look silently imploring him not to bring up how the bomb was the only thing that had saved them, the bomb and Tony’s apparent death wish, and he kept his mouth shut.

Natasha’s idea made sense, and it was really what they needed to be doing, at the very least to show Maria and Rhodey and the rest of the team that they hadn’t wasted time simply making posters saying THE END IS NEAR. The military operative and SHIELD agent in Steve was pushing him in that direction, laying out a map and writing what they knew up on the dry erase board to at least get their bearings, but the reality of the coming days loomed too tall. He wanted to sit and take them all in. They were likely going to be in a battle laden with a wish for revenge, against a race who had nearly slaughtered them all, and if one of them wasn’t going to come back this time, the least he could do was remember the little things about them that wouldn’t make it into a news article or biography.

\--- 

 _From: James.R.Rhodes@usaf.mil_  
To: tony@starkindustries.com  
Subject: listen

_Do you remember sophomore year when you had that final project for your dynamics lab and it was due in three days and you were insistent that the assignment didn’t make sense? And that you couldn’t ask your professor because then she’d have known you left it to the last minute? And how you burst into my dorm room unannounced and shouted about it for ten straight minutes before I told you that there was a third page to the printout that explained literally everything you didn’t get?_

_We have that third page. I’m not going to tell you to chill because this is still a much bigger deal than a dynamics project and telling you to chill does the complete opposite anyway. If you have to send all-caps emails to someone, send them to me, not Maria._

_\---_

_From: WilsonST@va.gov_  
_To: srogers107@starkmail.com  
_ _Subject: (No Subject)_

_I don’t even know if you’re going to get this, like how often do you actually check this account? But we’re in the air and this plane doesn’t have the cell service capability Tony’s does, and it was too much hassle to go back to get his when we were in a hurry. Thank god for wifi or we'd all be in the dark._

_I don’t know what you know about the situation, but Maria isn’t telling us much of anything detailed. Just the gist, I guess. And Maria and Clint aren’t talking about the last time they had to face these Chitauri so--Rhodey, Bucky, and I are kind of on edge. The rest of you are going to know what you’re looking at. Rhodey and I saw those things on TV, but that’s not the same. I’m not looking for comfort or advice or any of that because I know what I signed on for joining this squad, and facing the unknown is kind of what we do, but we’re still human. We can still get a little scared._

_I meant what I said in my note on the last report, too. I hope if you tried to run out into the desert by yourself that you’re reading this with a hammer pinning you down. We all know you’ve got a reckless streak in you for the sake of justice and the greater good, and I don’t want that to shift into something more. Lack of self-preservation for the hell of it. It’s a fine line, easy to cross but hard to come back from._

\--- 

There were certain things no one could prove anymore, Steve realized as he watched Bruce stare down at his hands. Nobody alive could corroborate his memory of catching the pop fly in stickball the summer after fifth grade, even when he had been stuck all the way out in left field. The magazine drawings he’d done for extra money in the winter when construction work was slow didn’t have his signature, the offices had been torn down or renovated, and the editors were long in the ground. Not even Bucky could remember the breathing pattern he would fall into when the asthma struck.

When he died, all of that would cease to exist. He wondered if other things would disappear along with him, if anyone else had noticed. Did Clint notice how Natasha tucked her hair behind her hair whenever she turned a page of a book? Had no one else discovered the stack of trashy romance novels under Bruce’s bed? Peggy’s husband had to have picked up on the particular gait she had when she was pushing her anger down, the way she carried her shoulders, but he could have missed it. They all could have missed it.

And who would know about the obnoxious frustrated smirks Bucky would have when Steve insisted that the profusely bleeding injury was not that big of a deal, or the nameless tune he would whistle while washing the dishes, or the fifteen-minute rant about how he didn’t know how to work a gun when he got drafted?

With the way things had gone, how pulling up those years had started to make Bucky shrink away, perhaps it was better to just let those pieces die with him so Bucky could get out of the shadow of this self he couldn’t get a solid grasp on. Recovery without a ball and chain--that would be good for him, wouldn’t it?

“What are you thinking about, Steve?” Natasha asked quietly.

Heavy footsteps groaned on the wood on the floor above them, accompanied by the air-warping swing of Mjolnir.

“Inevitabilities,” he said, and before she could question him further, Thor came bounding down the stairs.

“Everyone is safe and sound in Willowdale,” Thor announced. Mjolnir landed heavily on the lab bench behind Tony, and he jumped a little on his stool. “I also ran into a Professor Ross while we were in the labs, Bruce. She asked how you were.” Bruce nodded but didn’t look up from his hands--palm up, his fingers flexed slightly, then disappeared into his pockets. Thor frowned. “Shouldn’t we be readying ourselves?”

“Rest of the gang’s not here yet,” Tony said halfway into his hand. “Still missing crucial information--which they have and won’t share until they get here, helpfully enough--but now I think we’re having a nice little pow-wow contemplating our lives and how we’ve _fucked up_ so much to bring us here!”

Steve waited for someone to mutter the expected retort, a “speak for yourself” or any sort of denial, but none came, and he couldn’t get his throat to open enough to function. Whether or not he could have made himself believe the words anyway was an entirely different matter.

“The army handed us a nuclear bomb and we still couldn’t get rid of all of them?” Tony slammed his hands on the table, started pacing, and Thor’s grimace was starting to verge on the territory of pained. “And now they’re back, and we have no SHIELD, no army, no _nothing_ except what didn’t work the first time around.”

“Stark… Tony,” Thor said carefully. He reached to try to put a hand on his shoulder but Tony edged away . “It’s not the same fight. It will not be the same Chitauri, and we are not the same as we were either--”

“Yeah, no shit.”

The lab stool crashed violently to the floor before anyone had realized that Tony had started moving to the door; in his wake, days of scribbled lab notes fell from the table, completely out of the painstakingly disorganized system he had put together. Moments later, his feet clomped down the hallway on the level above them, followed by the metallic clank of that one suit he was able to recreate. The eventual muttering, growing louder and more understandable through the ceiling, pulled Bruce from his perch to follow him upstairs without a word.

“What I merely meant,” Thor said, pulling up a chair across from Steve and Natasha, “was that we are not the same because we are stronger and wiser… even if we do not feel that we are.”

“Tony’s a hard one to convince sometimes,” Natasha sighed.

“And how are you doing, Steve?” he asked. Thor’s voice had a way about it that fell heavily when he got serious: words thumped thick into your lap with the gravity he gave them.

“I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.”

As his tongue landed on the last N, all the soon-to-be-lost pieces of himself and others pushed forward in a frazzled wave, tangled in each other until he could see nothing distinct in them--just a grey roiling surge rushing towards the blank slate of the future. No levees or dams sat between them, and the wave would weave its way through and erode at the collective memory of them all, leaving behind the smooth chiseled form of a funeral, and then another funeral, and another and another until they were all just names. And the wave would move on, and the names would stay to be weathered, isolated from each other, an insignificant echo of a life once thought consequential.

“Steve?”

And he just wanted to lie down. Out of the path of it, away from the roar. He was so _tired_.

“ _Steve_.”

“I said I’m fine, Natasha--”

He was interrupted by an earsplitting crack that could have been called thunder had it not shaken the walls of the building and taken Thor by just as much surprise as any of them. Without windows in the basement, there wasn’t any way to what had caused it, and the shock cemented them to where they sat, except--

“What the fuck was that? Because it wasn’t me, for the record,” Tony yelled from upstairs, already on the move with Bruce trailing after. “Oh sh-- _guys--_ ”

They scrambled to their feet only to stumble into the doorframe when another blast rocked the lab. “What in the name of Hel and the Allfather is going on?” Thor shouted up the stairs, and when Bruce appeared at the top of them, he couldn’t get a full sentence out to answer. But it didn’t matter--because Steve could sense that they all already knew but didn’t want to say it.

\--- 

_(!)where the fuck are you guys clint_

_[Message undelivered]_

\--- 

_From: ntsha9727725218762@starkmail.odnorazovyy.com_  
_To: cbartonshoot@starkmail.com_  
_Subject: WHR R U  
_ _! This message was sent with high importance_

_pls tell me ur close, expls. hit p.a., need backup  
_

_pls tell me expl. wasn’t ur plane_

_From: cbartonshoot@starkmail.com_  
_To: ntsha9727725218762@starkmail.odnorazovyy.com  
_ _Subject: RE: WHR R U_

_we’re fine wasn’t us hold tight, 10 min out_

_we’re gonna be fine nat, we’re always fine. perfect record_

* * *

 

“You two looked tired,” Maria said when they landed. It was the first thing any of them had said since crossing over the western coast of Africa. “I’ll… I’ll find you sometime tomorrow for the debriefing, okay? I need to start scanning these files anyway.” Deplaning, she threw one exhausted, half-hearted grin over her shoulder and stepped out onto the Tower’s tarmac leading back toward the wide expanse of the common area, abandoned hours ago for what appeared to be an early night. Barely midnight, and not even Tony was left hovering at the bar.

Breaking the silence was only a temporary matter: once Maria left, the vacuum sucked back into itself, keeping out even the noise from the streets below. They rose to their feet slowly. Bucky watched Steve unfold from his seat, hands on his knees, straightening every vertebrae in his back one by one, and he didn’t movie until Bucky had managed the same. Somehow, Bucky thought to himself, their true ages must have caught up to them, because they were walking as if their joints needed grease to twist properly, and there was something edging at Steve’s face that hinting at a pain almost arthritic, if that deficiency could be allowed in this body.

On the way to the elevator, Bucky slipped his hand into Steve’s, fitting his fingers into their usual spaces, and before long Steve’s curled around his hand and half of the worry that had been eating away at his chest like acid eased off of him. The other half was still there, but the difference, that change from unbearable to excruciating, was almost heavenly.

The mission had accomplished what it meant to--Fury would have those files he needed-- _but_. He couldn’t make himself continue that train of thought. _But_. If he didn’t form his thoughts around it and recognize it officially in calling it by name, then it wasn’t real and it didn’t happen. He had protected Steve, just like he always had. The motion had felt so natural, grabbing and pulling away, fluidly shifting into a left hook--or in this case, reaching for his loaded pistol--eliminating the threat.

No, not eliminating the threat, not like that. Protecting Steve from the punks spitting their chewing tobacco in the back alleys, that was what it was, just not their back alleys. Or in an alley at all. And the punks in Eritrea had guns like the punks in Europe did during the war, and none of them got away like the ones in Brooklyn did.

“It happens,” Natasha had said during their excursion upstate. “Things will trigger reactions, and you’ll just-- _react_. Happened to me a few years ago. Ask Tony sometime about when I pinned Happy in his boxing ring.”  And it didn’t mean you were returning to whom they had made you be, she explained, even if it seemed like it. She had called them mental scars--and was still working on a better name for them, but it had made sense in the front seat of the sedan, surrounded by old pines and an occasional curious deer.

 _You are in control_ , he repeated silently to himself, just like she had said worked for her, and more and more of the anxiety released its grip on his lungs. It was because of that ingrained reaction that the close call was that the Hydra operative hadn’t gotten close to putting a bullet in Steve’s head, and that was what mattered in the end.

 _You are in control_. He grinned up at Steve as the elevator door closed behind him and received a tight smile in return. Their hands stayed locked together, and this was where he was meant to be, after all that had happened since he left New York for war on a day he could no longer remember.

 _You are in control_. He squeezed Steve’s hand, and he squeezed back, letting go to unlock the door to their apartment.

Steve started stripping off his mission gear almost immediately after the door shut behind them, and with none of the usual care. The straight spine he had so carefully aligned on the plane slumped around the shoulders as the outer layer was peeled off to lie in a heap at the toes of his boots, which weren’t coming off with his listless kicks. Even the shield wasn’t hung at its usual place by the door--face-down, wobbling as it gained its balance, the dull silver-toned inside shone up at the ceiling, at Steve’s carefully evading eyes under a thin layer of dirt from the desert.

“What’s going on?” But Steve didn’t turn around. “Steve, if there’s something--” Bucky reached out to touch his shoulder, clad now only in a thin t-shirt, but it pulled away from him.

“Not… not right now? I’m sorry,” he added. Sat down on the couch, yanked the boots off and tossed them under the table. Head in hands, and then sighing roughly, he stood back up to go lay on his back by the kitchen table.

Bucky’s own mission suit suddenly felt too tight around his neck, suffocatingly clinging to his chest, his arms, everywhere, and soon it joined Steve’s by the table. The sensation lingered. “Can I sit with you?”

“Sure.”

So Bucky sat at his side, halfway leaning up against the wall, inches away from his hands or feet brushing up against Steve’s shoulder. It was always a place he felt drawn to whenever he wanted to offer him comfort, latching on to the bony angles there--and later the muscles--so he drew close but kept the smallest distance he could get away with.

“What’s going on, Steve?”

“I’m fine.” He wouldn’t look at him, and it wasn’t even a reply that could have answered the question--

“Is this about… this last mission? Because it wasn’t what it looked like, you’ve got to know that--”

“It’s not. It’s not about that. It’s not about anything.” Sighed. Pursed his lips a bit, blinked just on the cusp of too hard. “Like I said, I’m fine.”

\--- 

(Was he fine? Physically--physically he was fine, and he knew the the Hydra operative he’d locked eyes with on the ground, the one with a hole in his head, was a mirror of himself. The rubble of SHIELD and the rubble of Hydra, alive and stone dead, face-to-face. He scratched at his forehead absently, saw Bucky cock his head to the side out the corner of his eye. No rusty flakes of dried blood stuck under his fingernail. So: fine. Alive. Alive and fine.

 _This isn’t just some back alley, Steve. This is war._ There wasn’t a difference anymore, couldn’t he see? Some things were never going to change no matter how they faced it.)

\---

“I just--see…” Bucky scrunched his mouth to one side, tapped the side of his head to search for the right words. Somehow the movements helped the mental buffering along, but other times they only seemed to increase the glaze of frustration in the other person’s eyes. Tonight, the later was in full force, and even though he had been rehearsing what he wanted to say for the last silent twenty minutes, nothing was coming out in the right order. “What I, tonight--okay. What I’m trying to say is… if you want to talk about the mission, y’know, before Maria’s debriefing, I would be okay with that. If you’re okay with that, then so am I.”

“Maybe in a minute. Just--” Steve took a deep breath, a long sigh, and Bucky marveled in the way his chest rose and expanded in a single fluid motion. “Give me a moment, okay?”

Maybe Steve was sorting through a difficult combination of being too keyed up from the mission but physically exhausted down to the marrow, and this was the only way to sort through it as his body leveled out. He really could be fine, Bucky reminded himself. Nothing had to be wrong.

\--- 

(Their last solo mission. He couldn’t get it out of his head. The snow clinging to the pine needles, the distant echoes of German shouting over the far ridge, and a slight chill creeping along his little toe and the tops of the others in his right boot. Bucky’s feet had to have been fully number from the ankle down by that point, but he kept slinking from tree to tree beside him anyway, as if it didn’t feel like he had cinderblocks attached to the bottom of his shins. They only had to follow the scouts to their base camp, raid their intel files and maps, and hightail it back to Gabe’s stakeout two miles from the SSR bunker before anyone realized they were there. In and out, simple.

Except he’d had a lapse in judging how much space his new body took up, clanged the shield on a tent pole, and he and Bucky were running back through the Austro-Italian-Yugoslavian woods shoving crumpled papers into whatever pockets would hold them and clinching maps under their arms. Shots rang and splintered tree trunks a wide berth on either side of them.

They’d failed. The only way the intel could have done them any good is having the scouts not know it was stolen, but his shield and uniform were unmistakable in the dreary grey canvas of winter even from a distance, and the scraps of paper that fell behind them as they ran would dispel any doubts that the Allies were the culprit.

“You got most of the good shit there with you,” Bucky panted, darting around a tree. “Go, take this”--he shoved a few more file folders into Steve’s hands--“and I’ll pick the rest of them off and catch up. No one back in Berlin will know we got it.”

“There’s got to be at least six men back there, Buck!”

“I know,” he said with a shrug, his voice light. “Should be easy.” He tried to grin but the corners of his mouth were as laden as his arms.

“No, okay--”

“Steve--"

“Not without you, remember?”

Bucky swore under his breath, and his face contorted like it was taking all his strength to keep from cursing at the top of his lungs at him; it was a face straight from the schoolyard, something Bucky had started doing before they got to junior high, and as they grew it had faded out, only reappearing in the most dire circumstances.

Such as running from Nazis with a punk who wouldn’t listen, clearly. Or giving the go-ahead to some harebrained explosives scheme Dernier had devised. Or, undoubtedly, watching that same punk walk out the door of their apartment determined to get the 1A stamp at a different recruiting office, even if he had never heard it for himself.

When Bucky had come back to himself, a few pieces must have gotten stuck in the barbed wire along the way, ripped from him, and that face was one of them, and _god_ how he missed it. He missed the threads that tied them to the history they shared. He reached for where they should have been and only grabbed at empty air.)

\---

“What did you want to talk about with this mission?” Steve said finally, and Bucky leaned up from where he had slumped a bit against the wall.

“Whatever you wanted to.”

Steve stared up at the ceiling, mulling over what he wanted to say. Bucky half-expected him to toss the question back, make him answer instead, but he held it close to his chest to warm it up before he answered.

“You know how many more of these places we’re going to have to raid?” he said. Still stared at the ceiling, and it was starting to feel deliberate instead of a consequence of thinking over the matter deeply. “How many more are going to form for every one we take out? Cut off one head, two more take its place, well no shit.”

Bucky reached for his hand, but he pulled away again.

“Seventy-some years of the same thing, Buck. We could have died tonight, the way things went, and for what? Some files?”

“We could have gotten killed for those files back in--wherever we were. Italy?”

“But that was the war, Buck. What is this? What is this now, today? What are we even doing?”

Bucky needed to touch him, to reassure him somehow. It was all he had with his words coming up bone dry in his mouth. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t, so he sat helplessly as Steve grew angrier with the ceiling, that low anger that bubbles only as far as the blush in his cheeks.

\--- 

(If they slept through VE Day, did that mean it didn’t apply to them? Were they the last one standing at salute, waiting for taps on the longest day of their lives?)

\--- 

“We’re fighting for what’s right, Steve,” he said quietly. “You know that better than any of us--”

“I…” Another deep breath, in and out; another surge through Bucky’s chest at the miracle that in all the time he’s been in this century, he hadn’t heard a single death-rattling cough. “I just don’t think I can keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“ _This_ , any of this! I can’t keep fighting the same enemy forever if nothing is ever going to change, and I can’t keep living here with all of you and your issues that aren’t ever going to change, and I’m so ready to just be--I don’t know, done with this part of my life.”

It hit Bucky in the stomach first, seeping up against gravity into his lungs, and the sour pucker in his bloodstream drew his face into a squint and out again. Heavy in his stomach, heavier as it stretched upwards, his insides growing thicker and thicker and more immobile.

“Are you breaking up with me?”

\--- 

(There are some things you can’t take back, even when you’re not the one who said it.

It all happened in less than a second, the sense that he was pushed down a path and behind him, all that was left was a dark black void, a solid thing holding him to the place he’d been planted. The vaguest shift to that fork in the road had propelled him down it with a mindless slip of the tongue, and he could not turn back.

The words were out there, in their heads, and they would bloom and grow and overtake if they tried to ignore it. If they could. Which they wouldn’t be able to. He knew that much, still.)

\--- 

“I… I guess I am.”

And he must have gotten to his feet, or crawled, or anything, because his face was soon deep in the kitchen sink, gripping the edges like he was going to rip it out of the counter, and the metal on the left side began to buckle under the strain. Whatever was left of the protein bars he’d eaten on the flight to Eritrea painted the basin, and when he stomach was empty, he kept heaving. His eyes watered from the strain of it, or maybe he was just crying. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. Something was breaking--was it the sink?--and it all felt heavy around his ears like the entire atmosphere was collapsing right on his head.

“Bucky…”

“ _Why._ ”

“I just told you, I--”

He pushed himself away from the counter and Steve had gotten to his feet while he was vomiting and he stood there looking like he hadn’t just kicked his face in repeatedly. Which he hadn’t of course, but something was still throbbing under his skin, hot and bright and shallow. “I don’t understand! Where is this coming from?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

\--- 

(More than anything he wished he could say yes, but the only thing he could say was what he was feeling at the core of him: nothing.)

\--- 

“ _Are you?_ ”

“I’ll leave. You can stay here. I’ll go--somewhere else--”

“No, no--Steve, please--”

And he wasn’t the type to grovel or beg, he could remember that from a foggy memory that hadn’t quite survived completely. Getting sacked from a construction job for no good reason, and they may have been short for food but they’d survived before. Bucky Barnes wasn’t about to beg then, but this wasn’t then, and this wasn’t a job. This was--

This was--

Steve was putting a change of clothes and his toothbrush in a plastic bag, eyes down and quiet.

This was the realization that he was going to wake up tomorrow cold, head turned up towards the white expanse of the ceiling, waiting for someone who was never going to come back for him.

“How can you do this?” His voice was smaller than he’d ever remembered hearing it. “How…” And his throat was closing up, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. “How can you do this?” _How can you stand there like we didn’t try to die for each other?_

Something blank was hiding behind Steve’s face, and it curled around his words. “Like this.”

The door shut behind him, and Bucky slid to the floor.

He would wake up soon. They would pull him out of cryo in a few minutes and wipe the elaborate freezer dream like they always did. He just had to wait.

* * *

 

Puente Antiguo was a small splotch on the horizon on any clear day, but the day was growing murky with the two trees of thick smoke rising into the sky. No one spoke. The plane shuddered around them as Maria pushed the throttle as far as it would go, frown growing deeper by the second. Clearly the hangar they flew out from hadn’t been upgraded to the latest Stark Tech, or even Hammer, and of all the days--

“Everyone suited up?” Rhodey asked.

No one answered. They peered out the front windshield around Maria’s head for any sign of the monstrous Chitauri leviathans flying through the sky--Bucky had seen footage of the things crashing through skyscrapers, obliterating six or seven stories with one pass-through, but there weren’t any yet, just the smoke. There wasn’t anything but the smoke.

“Get ready to drop,” Maria yelled over her shoulder. “Rhodey and Sam, get Clint and Bucky down to rendezvous with the others while I land. This piece of shit doesn’t have parachutes or anything, goddammit--”

“You’re not going into this alone,” Bucky yelled back. “I’m staying with you.”

“Barnes--”

“No one goes alone, okay?” Sam shouted over the two of them. “But look--”

They all followed the line of Sam’s finger to the smoke cloud towards the back of the town--it was finally dissipating, branches of the cloud turning into translucent wisps that were whipped out of existence when a gold and scarlet blur blew right through it.

“Can you get a twenty on the rest of them?” Sam asked Clint, nudging him in the arm.

“Thor’s on the ground in the center of the main drag,” he said after a few minutes. “No sign of Nat or Steve yet. They’re alive,” he added with a pointed look at Bucky. “I know they’re alive but I can’t see them.”

\--- 

“What do we do if we don’t even technically know what we’re fighting?” Steve stretched out his shield arm for what had to be the tenth time in half as many minutes.

“Well,” Natasha said from her perch at the alley’s corner, “I’d say we ought to start learning from our past experiences, wouldn’t you?”

A small jet roared overhead, emblazoned with some government agency logo along the fuselage.

“That’s not a Stark plane,” he said, frowning--but the hatch opened and Sam’s unmistakeable wings unfolded as he soared into the air, his hands clenched under Clint’s arms. Rhodey followed soon after in the Iron Patriot suit, chasing the tail of Tony’s latest vapor trail. “Okay… okay so they’re here--”

“Are Bucky and Maria still on the jet, then?”

Steve opened his mouth to reply, but the restaurant sign of the building next to them exploded in a whirl of blue light and fire. Bucky and Maria may have still been in the air, but he wanted them to keep going, turn back and get out.

\---

Maria put the jet down half a mile from the edge of the town, and across the blank expanse of the desert, the newest explosions felt muted. Small, distant figures decked out in black, heads covered by a peculiarly-crafted helmet of metal, weapons laid casually in their arms--they advanced up Main Street, a sizeable crowd, but nothing like the waves and waves from the hole in the sky like he had seen in the footage.

“That’s all Chitauri weapons and armor they’ve got on,” she said as she followed Bucky out of the plane. “All Hydra agents, all human. They’ve got a lot of firepower, but as long as this is it, we should be fine. Get one alive and take them back for questioning to really get this whole thing taken out for sure.” She checked her stash of ammo, clicking a magazine into place. Wiped the sweat from her hairline. “God, it’s hot. Even the dry heat--anyway. Let’s get going.”

They ran, watching out for cracks in the ground, the occasional embedded rock; screams from the residents were drowned out under the high-pitched squeals of the laser-like weapons reducing storefronts and signs to dust and ashes--arrows and bullets and the whole arsenal fired back against them from where the rest of the Avengers had established their front, but with every Hydra agent that fell, the ranks would close in and fill the gap back up without ever losing its shape.

“I don’t like this,” Bucky muttered. “Why aren’t they charging into the melee yet?”

“They don’t know it’s Hydra, they still think it’s the Chitauri themselves, and we’re not all assembled yet--it’s going to be fine--”

A metallic roar rumbled behind them, loud enough to turn the heads of their team in the midst of it all, as well as Bucky’s--he grabbed Maria’s shoulder to stop her. “What is that?”

He had never seen the color drain out of her face so quickly, even in the missions where everything had threatened to go straight to hell over the past few years: it took on a ghostly sheen from the sweat and sun, and before she could start getting words out, he felt her hand start pushing him forward while she remained immobile.

“Go set up your rifle and scope at the edge of town and stay hidden,” she choked out. “And turn your comms on.”

“Maria--”

“ _That’s an order_.”

\---

That roar, so absent from their lives the past five years, was all too familiar. Sam and Rhodey merely frowned, eyes growing wide once they spotted the looming dark figure on the horizon, but the rest of them froze--only a second or two, cementing their joints in place while the Battle of New York rushed up high on the back of their necks.

The adrenaline hit, and it was back to firing at the advancing mob and dodging the poorly-aimed alien ammunition. Steve couldn’t remember the Chitauri having aim this terrible the last time, but that was their main army, not these--what had Jane call them? Leviathans? He couldn’t remember that either. They kept shooting at the mass of them, nothing missing their marks in the flurrying blue streaks of bullets, and entire lines would get taken out by the carefully calculated aim when Thor gave his shield the baseball treatment, ricocheting back from cracked bricks of the pet store, the cafe.

“Team,” Maria said into their ears, and he jumped--another thing he’d forgotten in his moment, the comms were on, of course the comms were on--“It’s not the Chitauri, repeat it’s not the Chitauri. It’s Hydra, they’ve got old shit recovered from New York--”

The leviathan roared again, the blotch growing and growing with the pit in his stomach. The warship’s undulating body was becoming more apparent the closer it got, the gaping hole of its mouth waving back and forth as it sounded.

“If they’re not aliens, how the fuck are they controlling _that_?” Tony yelled, voice cracking towards the end.

“Shut the fuck up and keep firing, dammit!” Bruce shouted into his hands from behind the nearby parking lot wall. They were starting to turn green, his back hunching over.

One of the Chitauri beams hit dangerously close to where Clint had set up on one of the roofs, and another missed the tip of Sam’s left wing by inches--“They’re getting better,” Maria muttered in the comms, and then she was right beside them, taking cover at a position across the street from Natasha as a mirror, and Hydra just kept coming. There wasn’t a single sign that what they had been doing for the past however long had been the least bit effective.

He hadn’t seen Bucky yet.

Thor redirected the trajectory of a shot away from Natasha’s with his hammer.

He could be back at the jet because Maria didn’t deem him fit for mission duty. Back at the jet in the path of the leviathan.

Three beams made their way up to Clint’s perch, and Sam swooped down to pull him out of the way before they hit, dropping him back down once they passed, shooting a wave of bullets into the mob, but the Hydra agents weren’t working as individuals anymore; rather, they had melded together like a chain link fence, bending back with every blow only to warp back into the shape it had in the beginning, never breaking rank.

Where the hell was Bucky?

\---

 _In big, full-team missions_ , Maria had said a long time ago, _we won’t need you in the thick of things. We know you’re highly capable, that you’ve recovered from your trauma beautifully, far more so than any of those doctors Tony hired had ever dreamed. But we’re a team that plays to each other’s strengths and puts our thumbs in the holes of each other’s levees, and that’s all this is. You were one of the army’s best snipers in the war, and we don’t want to risk you getting sensory overload in the center of it all. So on these big missions, find a place to buckle down, and stay there._

The monologue was old, a few years old at that point, and it was playing on repeat in his head as he secured the last couple screws of his scope to the top of the rifle. The roof of the Quik-E Mart had a high wall, a number of nooks and crannies to duck behind from the ventilation system and the door to the stairs leading down into the store. Below him, Natasha was crouched behind a car, reloading her gun.

There was too much to focus on at once, too many things flying about and whizzing through the air, grinding sounds of metal before him--and also behind, from that thing that was now so close that Bucky could see the figure settle into a solid shape, and that was when he recognized it from the shaky cell phone recordings Tony had pulled up on Youtube one night when neither of them could sleep. Tony hadn’t watched with him, and he understood then, to a degree. But now he understood completely.

The noise started crowding out his thoughts. He let it: all the sound and tense worry at the pit of his chest morphed into a fuzz that made everything go quiet, and in the heat of the New Mexico sun, that dry, dry heat baking them into their suits, melting snow started to seep into where his knees dug into the earth and the sharp smell of the dead of winter overpowered that of the dirt clouds sticking to his skin. This was Europe as he could piece together, picking off Axis soldiers before they could aim their guns at Steve or Morita or Falsworth or any of them.

Four quick pulls on the trigger, four bullets digging into temples along the front line: a domino line of shudders and collapses up until the point where their legs were somehow still pumping forward a blink later.

“The fuck?” he muttered, and peering down at the scene outside the lens of his scope offered no further illumination.

No wonder the rest of them hadn’t come up with a better strategy than hold your ground and shoot. Their attacks weren’t holding Hydra to a standstill, but it was still slowing them down, and that counted for something when nothing else would work and that grotesque beast was set to barrel over them far too soon than they would have liked to think.

\--- 

“We have _got_ to do something different,” Rhodey said into the comms. He was running out of ammo, and he kept looking over his shoulder to the incoming threat, growing silent whenever he did. “This isn’t a viable option anymore--”

“Well what do you suggest, diplomacy?” Tony shouted. Bruce had transformed into the Hulk, and no one else could get through to him in the state he was in--Tony held up his hands, stood firm while the Hulk paced back and forth on the narrow road, eyeing Hydra and the leviathan with menacing suspicion. “Not going to work. I’d say we just let Big Green go ahead but--no plan. Civilians in the mix. I’m open to suggestions, you know."

Something different. Something different--they would be forced to do something different by the time the town fell under the leviathan’s shadow just to avoid getting decimated, never mind actually pulling out a victory.

And it was obvious, and suddenly so, how the plan was laid out so perfectly before him as if someone had painted the footwork to a waltz along the pavement. Time it right, offer the distraction, and most of them could walk away from this--

Keep the Hydra mob busy and the rest of the team could take care of the bigger threat. Pull off a few masks, break a couple noses, give them something front and center to aim for.

Overhead, the leviathan did a fly-by, darkening the street until it turned back to the west and twisted up into the sky, waiting briefly before rocketing back down towards the earth.

“Sh--you guys remember how to beat those things?” Sam shouting, his voice cracking.

“Hydra has added reinforcements to its armor,” Thor said. He started swinging his hammer, eyes scanning to try to aim at the writhing metal beast. “Our previous strategies might not suffice--”

All the while, Hydra marched forward to their turned backs, and Steve broke out in a run.

It wasn’t a good plan, to be sure, but feeling the soles of his shoes grit against the asphalt and the rush of air pushing around the shield taking the best of their blows, he could be calm running into the fray. This was it, wasn’t it? What he was meant to do, how it was supposed to end? The big potential sacrifice play, the good man melded into the perfect soldier with the perfect narrative--yet he didn’t sense that same dread digging into his gut from all those years ago. Dipping the nose of that plane towards the ice, his hands had shaken. There had been fear, that small voice in the back of his head: _oh, I was always meant to die young_.

Now--now there was nothing but his feet and the air pulling into his healthy lungs.

\---

This familiar feeling, it never had a name. It never even had a way to describe its full breadth. He just knew that how it took hold was without warning, and that how it let go was not yet discovered.

Bucky watched Steve sprinting down the double-yellow line of Main Street toward the army amassed there, and in the time it took for him to realize his knees had unfolded from their crouch, wind was already rushing through his ears and he leapt from the roof’s edge.

And Maria in his ear: “ _Bucky, what are you doing--_ ”

He didn’t have his rifle, left abandoned on the roof. Two pistols were tucked snug at his thighs, and his right hand reached for one blindly--

A clang rang out as Steve’s shield was knocked from his arm and he fell, mere feet away from the front Hydra line--

\---

His back slammed against the road. Shield out of reach. Rest of the team at a distance staring down the gaping mechanical mouth of the leviathan from above. And in slow motion, almost, so near stereotypical, a masked Hydra agent lowered their Chitauri weapon to dead between his eyes.

Then they were gone, and the entire scene sped up again, making up for lost time spent drawing up what had to have been his final moments, but: the shield was latched onto the shining metal arm of the figure standing over him, careening against the skulls of the mob, cracking their helmets and armor that snaked over their shoulders. And with every snap of metal, there would be a deliberate shot into their exposed skin--they would fall, then, and he couldn’t see them getting back up.

“End of the line, Stevie, remember?” Bucky gasped between shield blows. “And this is not the end.”

\---

When he pulled Steve to his feet, tossed back the shield, and stood back-to-back with him as the rest of the army advanced, he expected the scene to shift, for his vision to blur. One eye squinting against the dust, sun, and debris while the other traced the hazy line that, once crossed, took them back to Europe--their rough uniforms and leaking tents, guns that would catch and stick at the worst possible times.

It never came. He stayed present, completely, nothing creeping in from before the war or the gaping void after, and he was right where he was meant to be.

\--- 

The Hydra operatives shuddered and collapsed all at once, some stuck with arrows like human pincushions and others showing wounds long past the point of bleeding to death.

The leviathan lay, mouth agape, at the head of the road that stretched on into the highway, Tony laying before it face up and frantically yanking pieces of his suit from his body. The paint was chipped, stripped entirely from certain long sections along the legs and arms.

“You didn’t have to pull a Jonah again, you know,” they heard Natasha say, and they started carrying themselves back, leaning against each other’s shoulders as legs grew wobbly from the shock of the ceasefire. “With what Hydra had added to it, you didn’t know if you would sur--”

“Well I did, didn’t I?” Tony said shakily. The last handpiece of the suit went flying, smacking against the leviathan’s lifeless eye. “Stop crowding over me, I’m fucking fine.” He wasn’t, but they stepped away; only Rhodey remained to sit at his side while his breathing leveled.

\--- 

On the flight back to New York, Bruce was more talkative than they had ever seen him, chattering away to no one in particular about the hivemind nature of the Chitauri, how the refurbished leviathan had tapped into the technology in the armor and weapons Hydra had salvaged to put the strategy to use on humans, to keep them animated and attacking even when their bodies should have just let them die. Considering that, he said repeatedly, it was no wonder they looked unstoppable. Because for all intents and purposes, they were.

But only an hour passed before they had all fallen asleep against each other in heaps, Bruce included. Steve and Bucky remained awake, on opposite sides of the cabin’s aisle, sneaking glances at Clint, whose head was buried deep under the crook of Natasha’s arm, and the dogpile that had formed from the rest of them after a small patch of turbulence.

“Hey,” Steve murmured, nudging Bucky’s foot with his own. “I--I owe you one.” And he paused, looked away for the smallest moment before meeting his gaze again. “I owe you so much, for so many things.”

“Never.”

* * *

 

Imagine a cramped, drafty apartment in the center of Brooklyn Heights, tucked away in a dingy corner with windows that opened into an alley. If you stuck your hand out of them, you’d smack against the building next door.

If the clouds were low at dusk, everything turned gray, even the deep mahogany-toned red of the bricks; but somehow the apartment’s thin curtains twisted it all into something different, hues changing in the seasons like the leaves in Central Park. In the summer the floorboards bloom into goldenrod across the walls with the setting sun, and in winter he was purple through the delicate shadows catching in the hollows of his cheekbones.

It was snowing again, picking up violently for something so silent, and the purples digging into his face blackened as the skin grew tight, pushing up against the threat of another coughing fit.

“I’m running up to the drug store. Shouldn’t sound that bad after a day and a half.”

He would protest silently, casting on that look that so often earned him a black eye, but the sickly sheen rubbed away the sharp edges. Maybe it was just who he was looking at that wore it down to a nub.

Imagine 1938, standing on the cusp between one era and the next, wholly unaware of how your toe is balancing on the head of a pin standing alone in the vast gulf of time.

A few crumpled bills tossed over the counter, a bottle of cough syrup and codeine tucked in the jacket pocket to replace it. The bottle would be drained, empty, barely doing its job, but the dollars never felt wasted even against a growling stomach. At least it would let him sleep.

This time around, the thermometer hardly bothered to give a straight reading--death sat hot and wet under his tongue, and that was all that mattered. There wasn’t any need to quantify that. Flu, pneumonia, TB, who knew what it was--his ma was dead and couldn’t diagnose. The doctor was too expensive and too far to walk to in the cold.

So: a hand gripping the weak clammy one shifting against the sheets, eyes watching the fitful squirm of fever. A scene that belongs to no one, warped through a sickly recollection or erased between the electrodes and drugs and time and ice and time again--the hand in health belonged to an apparition, an absent figure without a name, a third party who looked like a mirror.

No one who was present can attest that it actually happened and that it wasn’t something they dreamt one dark night only to take it as truth, wholeheartedly, until any gap of difference had completely dissolved. They didn’t speak of it, but they didn’t need to.

The boy in the bed had a fever that was ready to break the mercury and his thin weak body, and the boy at his side had a thousand questions. When should I know to call the priest? How do I know if I’m overreacting? What am I supposed to do if I’m not and it comes to pass like I fear? How do I help him if he’s about to leave me? What do I do if, for once in his life, he’s scared?

Sweat was beading along his hairline and sliding down to the pillow. Eyes were half open but seeing nothing, merely wrenched open by the futile attempt to twist away from whatever was causing him pain. And his hand was held tightly as the other boy focused on breathing--his own lungs pushing in and out, the labor of the ones before him drowning in the effort.

“No, no, you see--see here, okay?” He laid the bony hand on the bed as he reached for the sick boy’s sketchbook and the pencil that had been worn down to a dull point. He flipped through the pages, past rough outlines of the apartments across the street to detailed profiles of himself--a sight that made him pause, made him realize his vision was starting to blur and leak--and found a blank page towards the back.

A light line to start it off, an inch off the edge of the left side of the paper; and then a scribbled point leading to a dark, pressed line that slashed across until the page ran out on the opposite side. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but you’ve got to understand. See?” He pointed at the faint line, the point it ran into. “This is me before I met you. And here’s that day in the schoolyard when you gave me part of your sandwich. It was a great sandwich, I don’t know if I ever told you.” Moving past the point, his finger smudged into the darker line, running back and forth over it, lingering where it moved off the page and into the blankness of space. “Here’s us now. See, we’re on this line. And if I were going to draw another point where we are right now, this very second, it would be--here, somewhere.” He laid his finger just to the right of the point. “Look at all we got left here. We’re nowhere near the end, okay? And it doesn’t even end, not really, just keeps on off the page because I ran out of room. You and me, we’re going to make it til the end of the line, okay, the both of us together, which means you can’t die. Not now.”

Even in the haze of fever, the other boy heard every word--and while he later attributed it to a fever dream, he still held on to it close to his breast all the same.

He fought and he fought and he lived: the refrain.

Imagine a moment so crucial to history that history still forgot, the stone cold foundation on which textbooks and museum exhibits would be built, glued together by the caulk of two hands clasped, mixing sweat and heartbeats; the modern mythos as outlined on yellowing paper, extending out past the bricks of a nowhere room, digging into the thin dirt between the cracks of the Brooklyn sidewalk and growing until no one could say that it hadn’t always been there, and no one dared to doubt that it would always be.

* * *

 

After they landed back in New York, the whole lot of them back together again, Bucky half expected a gathering around the breakfast table or just sprawled over the couches in the common room, stuck in that hazy fatigued space of conversation pushed along by abandoned self-filters. But instead, they dragged themselves into the Tower, took one look at the empty chairs, and trudged forward to the elevators and into their apartments, Steve apparently lost in the mix.

The quiet was startling once he was alone.

He’d been scared enough for one lifetime, at least until tomorrow.

The balcony was a welcome escape from the close pressure of nothingness on his ear: even approaching the wee hours of the night, Midtown still flared with honks and tire screeches, and the glow of the Tower’s A was as much of a sun as he wanted after that brief stint in New Mexico.

He tried to think about nothing, just soak up the view of the city like he did the last night before he shipped out to Europe on the fire escape of their old apartment. Steve had been asleep, he thought, or it made sense if he had been since there would have been no way he would’ve been allowed to brood on his own.

_You are here. It is 2017, and Steve is here too. You are here, and you are okay._

Only after his phone pinged did he notice a couple of hours had passed. A message lit up his screen. It was from Steve.

_Meet me on the Brooklyn Bridge?_

_Okay,_ he texted back. _You wanna walk together? Are you at Nat’s place? Or Sam’s or...?_

_No, out. I’ll find you there._

It was a long walk, upwards of an hour and a half if he didn’t catch the crosswalks at the right time, and he still yearned to keep the insides of himself quiet, to hush the buzzing trail of ticker tape along the bottom of his vision. He pressed outwards on himself. Small hands reached out from inside his ribcage to grab whatever grew near: a stray cat, an idling taxi, aromas of stale coffee from the bodega on the corner, the deep black cover of city night muting out the stars.

He stopped by the windows of a couple restaurants, neon open signs switched off and the menus by the door illegible from the dim streetlamp. All sorts of things he hadn’t gotten around to trying and that hadn’t even made their way into the daily “what’s for dinner” debate. Ethiopian and Dominican and Uzbek, specialty shops for everything from tea and popcorn to organic pet food. He didn’t have a pen, much less paper to write it on, so the list started out in his head--Thai food was long eliminated from the original and the edges of that page were starting to soften, anyway.

The sun was rising as he approached the center of the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, traffic already picking up beneath his feet. Joggers maneuvered around his slow, shuffling gait along the painted line by the railing, the sun emerged in careful smudges--and in the distance, he spotted that distinct set of shoulders, messy blond hair.

“Hi,” Steve said breathlessly once they met.

“Hi.”

“I, um--here.” He held out his hands, another flower secure in a ceramic pot: an iris with a tall, proud stem, pale yellow petals. “This isn’t--I’m not--”

“It’s okay.” Bucky stuck his face close to the center of the flower and inhaled deeply--the scent was rich and full and sent a tickle up to the bridge of his nose, tightening until it released in a loud sneeze.

“Bless you,” murmured Steve with a small grin.

“Guess we finally figured it out, huh?”

“I guess so.”

God, how he’d missed this, the easy simple talk when they didn’t have to balance the weight of too many things that remained unnamed. They leaned up against the railing towards the sunrise and Bucky held the iris before him, positioning it just right so the light would shine through the petals and spark the pale hue to a vibrant gold. It was the same color he saw along Steve’s hair at high noon, at the right angle, at the right moment. 

“What I was trying to say before, Buck,” he said, “was that--this isn’t me trying to get back together--” 

“I know.” 

“--but I’m never going to leave you for good. If that’s something you’re okay with.” 

And Bucky felt himself start to laugh, tensing those muscles left idle too long, but he held it in. If only Steve could hear himself. If he was okay with it? Why wouldn’t he be? Parts of him still held fast to bruises but they were healing fast--even the deepest maroons had faded into pale yellow and no longer stung to the touch like they had. “Of course,” he said quietly, nudging Steve in the shoulder. “I mean… I was hurting for a long time. You saw that in my notes, I guess. I think I was afraid that you were going to disappear again. But… I think…” he sighed. “I’m just glad I got to love you like that while I did. Even if it was a bit of a failed experiment.” 

“Me too.”

They stood close to each other and the sky shifted in the blue of early morning. The thumps of joggers and cyclists increased behind them, the noise of a city rising from bed instead of longing for it, and after a few minutes of feeling the breeze in their hair, Steve laughed quietly to himself, shook his head. 

“What?”

“I was thinking how Peggy told me she used to come down here sometimes after a rough mission just to think,” he said. “She said she liked the view.”

“It’s a nice view.”

“It is,” Steve said, squinting towards the river and into the sun. “But I keep thinking she wasn’t telling me something.” He turned suddenly to Bucky with a determined shine in his eyes that seemed to stretch back through all their history while it still looked forward into him. “I mean what I said earlier. I won’t ever leave. Not for good. I--can I still say ‘I love you?’”

His gaze softened just like it would after Bucky would give him an arm up from the ground after a fight, and the warmth swelled up in his chest again, that surging affection for the punk who followed him into war and the future with that defiant, enormous heart.

“Only if you mean it."

“I do. I mean it with everything in me.” His hand slowly rose and secured itself on Bucky’s left shoulder.

“So do I.”

They beamed at each other, a split-second burst, ducked heads, and Bucky pulled the iris close under one arm, weaving his other through Steve’s to pull him back towards Manhattan. Both of their steps felt wobbly and new, but they kept their heads down, eyes pointed to the toes of their shoes and the line painted down the middle of the walkway with the wood pushing up flakes of it, the imperfect guiding image stretching onwards, disappearing into the horizon.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found [elsewhere](http://santiagoinbflat.tumblr.com/) as well, if you're into that sort of thing.


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